


Rainbow Sleeves

by Lucy



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Child Abuse, F/M, Female Bruce Banner, M/M, Multi, Rule 63, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-16
Updated: 2013-02-20
Packaged: 2017-11-16 11:40:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 44,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucy/pseuds/Lucy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bryce Banner is on uncertain ground as she accepts a job with Stark Industries after the Chitauri Invasion. Her footing slips even more when she realizes that Tony and Steve seem to be offering her a place in their newly-forming relationship. Having everything she never knew she wanted is a heavy burden, and when General Ross teams up with an old friend in a plan to either capture Bryce or simply drain her head of all the knowledge of her creation of the Hulk, it feels almost welcome. At least she's used to fighting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first attempt at Rule 63 fic, inspired by a prompt in the Avengerkink meme as well as some talk on Tumblr a while back. It's also my first attempt at Stark Spangled Banner. Be patient with me.
> 
> The title comes from the brilliant Rickie Lee Jones song of the same name, which I think could be applied to any of the threesome here in various different ways. Listen to it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKMGH1Xhtc0&feature=related

For the second time in one day, Bryce woke up exhausted, in pain, and completely naked in a pile of rubble. And for the second time in one day a man was standing over her, making it clear he'd been watching as she slept.

The old man, the security guard at the warehouse, hadn't been a threat. The first thing he did was toss her a pile of clothes, blushing, before recounting how she'd gotten there and why there was a huge hole in the ceiling overhead.

The second man was Tony Stark, and of all the things she could call him, 'not a threat' wasn't on the list.

“I have to say, I'm a little disappointed that your alter-ego isn't anatomically correct,” were his greeting words as he stood there leaning against a wall in his blackened, tattered armor.

There was a smirk on his face, the same one he wore when first meeting her. Before shaking her hand and talking about her research he had approached with the same smirk, with a typical up and down sweep of his eyes that said 'yes, you're a person and a scientist and we're going to deal with that, but first and foremost you are a woman.'

It wasn't an unusual look. It was depressingly typical. In fact, Bryce had to give Tony credit – normally the part about her being a person and a scientist wasn't even included. Then again, so far it was the worst thing she could say about the man, that his eyes had betrayed him that way at first meeting. Ever since then he had been...well, not professional, because she suspected he was never that. But he hadn't given her that up and down look again, and once they moved into the lab and started work decoding the gamma signature on that staff, he very much treated her as a scientist first and foremost.

But the smirk was back, and almost unnerving.

“I mean imagine. The only thing that would scare a guy more than a huge green monster bearing down on them would be if that monster had...well, _those._ ”

“Charming,” she said, her voice a croak. If he was expecting her to blush or try to cover herself, he was about eight years too late. Bryce pushed herself to sit up, feeling about twice as weighted down and sore as she usually did after a change.

“I don't suppose you brought me anything to wear?” she asked, stretching out and wincing at the pull of overworked muscles in her shoulders. “Or were you enjoying the show too much to think about it?”

He had the decency to duck his eyes. “I, uh. I haven't been here that long. Had a hell of a time tracking you down after Big Green took off from the tower. Whatever trail she leaves isn't all that noticeable when half of Manhattan is--”

“It.” Bryce pushed to her feet, leaning back to grip a wall as her muscles protested the movement. She was used to having to scrounge up some bit of fabric for decency, but the Thing had apparently retreated to the safety of a half-demolished bank in order to change back, and there wasn't anything in sight.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah, let me...” Tony seemed to realize what she was looking around for, and he tromped away from the edge of the rubble she was currently swaying in, metal suit clanking as he explored the heaps of concrete and glass around them.

Bryce let him go, figuring he owed her one for the peepshow he indulged in while she was sleeping. She sagged back against the wall and shut her eyes, taking stock of her aches.

“You don't call her a she?” Tony called over after a moment.

Bryce didn't bother opening her eyes. “It's not a she. You said it yourself, the anatomy isn't there. Nothing indicating mammary glands, nothing going on between the legs. Given the musculature, most reports from spectators after Harlem called it a he. But all of it – he and she and nicknames like Hulk – they're all ways of personifying a thing that doesn't benefit from personification.” She was short of breath after all that, and she pried her eyes open to put her focus on the situation at hand rather than the rumblings in her mind. “It is a temporary mutation resulting from irradiated blood, it isn't a person in and of itself.”

“You think so, huh?” Tony was half-hidden behind a crumpled counter space, and when he emerged he had something dirty and white and stiff hanging from an arm. “I don't know that I agree. Uh, I think this is a tablecloth, and one of those awful cheap ones, but--”

She pushed off the wall and put one foot in front of the other in slow, determined steps. “It'll work, and you mind telling me exactly what you think you know about that Thing that I don't?”

Tony tossed the tablecloth to her, staying outside the rubbled, dented floor where the heavy suit might make a bad situation more unstable.

Bryce grimaced at the vinyl material but shook it out and made short work of tying it like a short but serviceable sari. It wasn't the worst she'd ever had to settle for after a change.

Tony seemed impressed, in his amused way, and he held out a hand to help her stumble over the edges of rubble.

“To answer your question...” he said, not letting go of her hand for a conspicuous moment even after she was down on solid ground. He regarded her, dirty and bloody from battle, disheveled, but his eyes as bright and intent as they had been this whole time.

Something about the look made Bryce warm up, something that horrifyingly felt like it might turn into a blush.

“...that Thing, whatever you want to call it, came through for this city, stomped Loki enough to take him out of the battle entirely for the last half, and caught me as I fell from, and I mean this literally, _outer fucking space_. And given what you've said about her...it...so far, and how little that matches what I saw when it was in action, I'm getting the idea that you really don't have a clue about exactly what it is you're sharing body-time with.”

Bryce met his eyes, and had a moment of back and forth about how to respond. There was a part of her, a huge part, that wanted to just be offended, to tell Stark off for thinking that in a few hours he had a better grasp on the Thing than she did after eight years. But, and maybe it was the exhaustion from the last forty-eight hours causing this, a part of her was only wearily amused by his words. Tony Stark was not afraid to challenge people, that was for sure. It was nicer to be doubted than feared. In a way.

A very small way.

In the end she trudged past him, watching the floor for glass shards as she made her way barefoot to the door and listened to him clanking behind her. Later on, when she'd eaten and slept for a year, she might have the energy to get offended.

But for the moment he got a pass.

 

* * *

 

Steve Rogers was an opposite to Tony Star in a lot of ways. That went without saying, really, especially for anyone who knew either man for more than five minutes.

Bryce saw it in small ways. The way he approached her as she finally reached Stark Tower, after stumbling through Manhattan with Tony Stark doing fly-bys every five minutes to see if she wanted a lift. The way his eyes immediately averted when he realized that she wasn't fully dressed.

Some might mistake Steve for a prude, leftover from 1940s Puritan views about flesh and femininity. But Bryce saw no blush on his face, no pause in his steps. His dropped gaze wasn't embarrassment, it was respect.

“Doctor. I'm glad you made it back alright, I was getting worried.”

“I'm just slow to get going after a change,” she answered with a faint smile at his back as he immediately turned and led her into the Tower.

There were people everywhere, SHIELD agents who made her spine stiffen, all gathering piles of what looked like every piece of fallen alien armor and weaponry they could find. There weren't any civilians in sight, and she assumed Stark's employees had all gone home way before Loki had taken over the building.

Which made her wonder why Tony hadn't been alerted to the tesseract's presence at his tower before that algorithm could run, but who knew if the man checked his voicemails.

“So is there...” She turned to Steve, trying not to feel awkward in this bustling ant pile of SHIELD agents while draped in a vinyl tablecloth from the break room of a bank. “Is there some kind of debriefing now, or what?”

Steve glanced at her again, and this time when his eyes inadvertently caught sight of her bare shoulder and draped cloth he reached for her arm and steered her fast through the agents and towards a back row of elevators.

“Sorry, Stark's invited us to his private rooms to recuperate, I should have taken you straight there. I'm sure we can find some, um...some clothes for you.”

She followed him into the elevator without asking any questions. She had vague memories of the Thing smashing through glass and pounding Loki into the floor, but if Steve didn't doubt the structural integrity of the elevators then she was too tired to worry about it.

“As for debriefing, I'm not sure what Fury has planned, but his authority as far as we are concerned is limited.” Steve faced the door in the elevator, his jaw set. “The Avengers, if we're going to make this group last, will not be under the authority of SHIELD.”

“Really?” Bryce had vague memories of the chaotic moments she was last herself on the helicarrier, the revelation that this agency that had brought her in for help was really just searching for a misplaced weapon. Whatever happened after she left – in mind then in body – must not have undone the damage that revelation had caused.

“Well. I haven't exactly been able to speak to Director Fury about this,” Steve allowed after a moment, glancing at her. “But that's how things will be, for myself and, I'm sure, for Mr. Stark.” He regarded her.

She nodded, sagging back against the wall as the elevator climbed the ridiculously tall tower. “I'm normally not given a choice,” she said wryly. “But I never intended to become anyone's weapon.”

He studied her at that, questions in his eyes, but the elevator slowed to a stop before he could ask any of them.

Bryce looked out as the doors opened and raised her eyebrows at the white-walled, carpeted hallway the elevator opened onto. It might have been a hotel corridor, or any other office building. She was almost disappointed, expecting something more obnoxious from Tony Stark.

Down the hall – which, now that she was thinking about it, might have been made to look incredibly plain on purpose – there was a set of double doors that slid open as he approached.

Ahh, and there was the luxury she had expected. High ceilings, marble floor, an elegant and uncomfortable looking couch in front of a fireplace, a television filling a wall, a bar in the back. Like a den out of some kind of designer magazine that Bryce would never have been interested in looking at.

An overhead computerized voice, British for some reason, greeted them. “ _Good evening, Captain Rogers. Might this be Doctor Banner?”_

She sent an amused look upward. “Tony equips his AI with intellectual curiosity but no facial recognition software?”

The voice answered instead of Steve. “ _I find that it makes visitors uncomfortable when I identify them without being introduced.”_

She laughed quietly. “Manners. The last thing I would expect in one of Tony's programs.”

“ _I am self-learning. Some things I have taught myself.”_

She smiled, impressed, more because this sort of advanced AI was either an incredible mimic of behavior or advanced far beyond any technology that had been available in her days studying. Her opinion of Tony, still forming, was having to stretch into another direction.

“JARVIS,” Steve cut in finally, “is there a way to arrange for a change of clothes for the doctor?”

“ _Of course, sir. Mr. Stark has already arranged for Miss Potts' rooms and closets to be made available to the doctor. He has also left suggestions for which of Miss Potts' outfits he recommends she wear.”_

“I'll bet he has.” Steve sighed and shot Bryce a look, apologetic, as if he were to blame for Tony's ways.

She shook her head, her exhaustion starting to outweigh her ability to be amused. “Just show me the way, please.”

Steve walked with her as JARVIS lit a bright path back down the corridor. “Thor is watching over Loki somewhere in the lower floors of the tower,” he said as they went. “I believe Agents Barton and Romanoff are assisting SHIELD on street-level.”

She didn't bother asking who Barton was, remembering glimpses of a leather-clad man with a bow and arrows of all things. “All I need is a shower and the biggest meal I've ever eaten. Then I'll be on my way and out of your hair.”

He looked surprised for a moment, then smiled faintly. “I hope you're prepared to field some objections to that plan.”

“From SHIELD? I thought you weren't--”

“Not from SHIELD, doctor. From us.” Steve stopped in front of the door JARVIS led them to. “We'll talk about future plans once we've rested some. I'll leave you to it.”

Bryce shot him a wary look. He didn't make her hackles rise the way the uniformed SHIELD agents did, but he was still Captain America, soldier and patriot. Were his objections going to be personal or something more severe? She didn't know him well enough to be able to tell.

But it was fine, she always found back doors before when people had 'insisted' she stay where she was. She could find one there, even in the middle of Stark Tower, if she had to.

She smiled, small and polite, and turned to the door. It slid open as she got closer.

“Doctor Banner.”

She glanced back at Steve, hesitating in the doorway.

He met her eyes and smiled suddenly, small and restrained but genuine. “Thank you. For coming back, I mean. You turned the tide today.”

And there was something guileless in those blue eyes, whether he was the pure 1940s innocent people thought he was or not. He was warm, at least, a human beyond the soldier.

That made something inside of her relax. She returned the smile, for the second time that day feeling her cheeks heating in a blush. She nodded without replying and let the door close between them.

 

* * *

 

Whoever Miss Potts was, judging from her clothes she was six feet tall and about 98 pounds. It only took a glance into her closet to realize that most of those sleek, tailored outfits would never fit Bryce. She was too short, her shoulders and hips too broad. And way too much breast for these trim blouses.

She was feeling pretty zen from her shower, though, and didn't let herself get too frustrated. She finally found a long, flowing skirt that wasn't fitted at the waist, and in the back of the closet were some workout clothes that included some larger t-shirts. Larger for the mysterious Miss Potts, at least. Bryce put one one and could see just from the stretch across her chest that it was going to look obscene on her either way.

She switched out the first shirt she grabbed for a darker one, and wondered as she looked in the mirror if this was akin to a laundry-day outfit for Tony's girlfriend. They were still the nicest clothes Bryce had worn in years, even if they did make her look like she was trying to be a pinup model.

No risk of anyone mistaking her for Bettie Page, though, not with her short, constantly disheveled curls and awkward physicality.

The foray into a no-doubt beautiful woman's designer wardrobe only dimmed the peace she felt after the hot shower a little bit, though, so she decided to risk leaving this stranger's private rooms instead of immediately forming a getaway plan.

“JARVIS?”

“ _Yes, Doctor Banner?”_

“Is Steve...um, Captain Rogers...are he and Mr. Stark...”

“ _Currently with Thor and Agents Barton and Romanoff. I believe they are waiting on you.”_

For some reason those words put her at ease a bit. Her time with them wouldn't last, she had no doubt, but for a moment, a day, it was nice to be expected somewhere. Like she was part of something.

 

* * *

 

“There she is!” Tony's grin stretched out wide enough when Bryce entered the room to confirm her fears that the fit of those clothes were bordering on indecent.

Luckily for her nerves no one else seemed to bat an eyelash. Natasha and Barton barely glanced her way, and Thor nodded to her in greeting. Steve's face was red, and she wondered if Tony had been trying to stir up trouble with him before she walked in.

“Okay, now normally I'd be okay with the idea of this group, whatever we end up being, being a democracy. But tonight I'm calling the shots, and we're going for shawarma.”

No one seemed to have the energy to argue with Tony, and as they trudged towards the elevators Tony fell into step with Bryce and threw an arm over her shoulder.

“You clean up nice, doc,” he said with a grin, grabbing for Steve as he tried to pass by, other arm looping around Steve's shoulder. “Doesn't she clean up nice, Cap?”

Bryce sighed but tolerated the touch, though this was going to be the only thank-you he got from her for letting her borrow someone else's clothes.

“Steve,” she said before Steve was forced to stammer out some answer. “I appreciate what you said earlier. Once I figure out where I'm going from here, I'll let you know. I can't promise anything, but if you need me, or _it_ , I'll try to be available.”

Tony snorted over Steve's answer. “You really think you're leaving now that I've got you here, doc?”

“You think you can make me stay, Stark?” she asked in turn.

He laughed. “I don't make people do anything,” he answered cheerfully. “All I have to do is show them the options I'm offering and they always end up seeing things my way.”

She couldn't help a small smile at his certainty. A smile that grew even bigger when Steve caught her eye from the other side of Tony and rolled his eyes, a gesture that for once made him seem like the twenty-something kid that he physically was.

She laughed, and didn't bother arguing with Tony as they headed out to get food. Maybe getting a first-hand look at how much Bryce had to eat after a change would dim his enthusiasm for making her a house guest.

 

* * *

 

Of course it didn't. The only thing her seventh order of shawarma and fries caused was a broad smile from Thor and some salute about a warrior's appetites. But by that point everyone else was at least half-asleep and probably wishing she'd choke on the meal so they could all just leave.

 

* * *

 

One night in Pepper Potts' bed was all she promised Tony, since by the time they got back to the Tower everyone was ready to drop and no one was turning down Stark's accommodation offer.

But that wasn't good enough for Tony, and so the next morning he arranged for her to go down with him and visit the R&D levels, and then Tony's personal labs.

It was effective.

Bryce could laugh at, and feel a certain amount of contempt for, the luxury in Tony's private room. From the art on the high walls to the plush carpets and marble tiles down to the sheets on Pepper Potts' bed, Tony obviously had no issues with buying the best of everything, whether it was worth it or not. It was a jarring thing, gaudy-feeling and not all that pleasant after the bare living in Kolkata and all the years past.

But when that sense of unbridled luxury extended to his workspace, Bryce had to admit she got a little starry-eyed.

She wasn't the engineer that Tony was, but one of her PhDs was in Applied Sciences. She hadn't done any practical work for years, and advances in technology moved so fast that she didn't recognize much of anything that she saw in his private workspace, but she could piece together enough about what it was and what it might do.

Tony for all his careless irreverence beamed like a proud father as she explored the workspace, pointing out equipment and casually mentioning the advances he himself had made in most of the technology around them.

Her heart wasn't in applied science, but by the time they walked out of that space and headed for another lab, her mind was racing with a painful kind of nostalgia. Lab work, sterile environment, clean machines, hours and hours spent repeating the same experiments hundreds of times with just the slightest variation and painstakingly recording every result.

She missed it.

She missed the days when she could just be a scientist. So much that she was starting to feel a little emotional as they took the elevator up a floor and Tony grinned so carelessly as he ushered her into the last lab space on the tour.

It only took her a moment to realize that something about this one was different. For one thing, it was much more clean and sterile than his other spaces had been. The counters were spotless, stainless steel without so much as fingerprints on them. The equipment was familiar to her. Very familiar.

She walked through slowly, losing track of Tony, and ticked off each thing that she recognized. Almost everything in that lab was something she had either needed or tried to recreate with garbage and scavenged spare parts in the last few years. A gas chromatograph tucked in a corner. Along the back wall an analytical x-ray machine stretched over a broad counter. There was an entire series of centrifuges, from refrigerated to micro-hematocrit, not a single one made from an old wheelbarrow tire or bicycle chain.

By the time she, wide-eyed, reached a sparkling new hematology analyzer that must have cost two hundred grand if it cost a dollar, she realized that something was off about all this.

She turned, feeling breathless, and sought out Tony.

He was still in the doorway, leaning against the frame with arms folded. He grinned, probably seeing on her face that she was already putting two and two together and getting something out of it.

She had to swallow before she tried to talk. “Why exactly do you need all of this?”

“I don't,” he said, moving away from the door and revealing a nameplate. She wasn't close enough to read it, but the Dr B- at the beginning was big enough to be clear.

She moved towards it a few steps, but her feet locked up and her eyes swept the counters, the gleaming new equipment. The space, the technology. The silence. The time.

There was no way in hell that this man was just offering her everything that she had spent years missing. Life wasn't like that. Her life especially wasn't like that. It was a trick, an illusion. He wanted something horrible in return. He was just putting her at ease before calling Ross on her. _Something_.

“What's the catch?” she asked finally, feeling lost but keeping her eyes on his as if she could appear more steady than she felt.

He shrugged, ambling in now that he'd done his big reveal. He glanced around as he walked but didn't seem nearly as interested in this place as he had been in his workspace just a flight below.

“There's a contract upstairs for you to read through,” he answered. “Pretty standard. It entitles Stark Industries to be a named party on any patents you apply for while working here, some profit-sharing, salary details, all that.”

“Salary.”

“Well, yeah. Every employee we have is salaried, down to the receptionists and the contractors working that Starbucks counter in the lobby. I don't like hourly wages, they tend to screw people.”

“Tony.” Bryce drew in a deep breath, worried that she was close to doing something humiliating, like breaking down. “What's the _catch?_ ”

His smile softened, and there was understanding in his eyes. “Tell you what, why don't you take your time and look around, make a list if you want of anything I missed stocking this place up, and join me upstairs to go over details. JARVIS?”

“ _Yes, sir?”_

“Are Doctor Banner's rooms ready?”

“ _I believe the contractors are packing up to leave now.”_

“Perfect.” Tony shot Bryce a smile. “Just a heads up that the surprises aren't done yet.”

She couldn't think about it, didn't want to imagine some ornate designer apartment in the middle of this glass and metal tower. The lab alone was already too much. She just shook her head.

“I told you,” Tony said as he turned and headed for the door to leave her to her swirling reactions. “All I have to do is show the options that I can offer, and people usually end up seeing things my way.”

He went through the door without letting her reply, and it slid shut behind him to reveal the Dr Banner nameplate.

She looked away from it, from the doors, from the job and the rooms and everything else he was apparently offering her. She looked back at the counters full of brand new, top of the line equipment, and that was more than enough to get her eyes burning alarmingly.

“JARVIS?” she said quietly.

“ _Yes, Doctor Banner?”_

“Is he serious? Is he _insane?_ ”

“ _The latter depends on who you ask, Doctor. But I can attest that he had the contract for your employment drawn up the very night he discovered that he would be working with you.”_

She slumped against a counter but straightened immediately, strangely nervous about the idea of smudging the immaculate steel. “Because of the monster.”

“ _Because of your research, doctor. Mr. Stark demands the best and can afford to get it. That goes for people as well as equipment. I believe it's as simple as that.”_

Bryce let out a breath, eyes on the floor.

She was the best at what she did, or had been years ago. It wasn't ego to say that there was no one alive stronger in the field of radiation, and very few people as strong in biophysics. She fought for it, a constant upward slog through a male-dominated educational system, going into government work, military work, and dealing with the macho bemusement of everyone she met there. It was said that women had to be twice as good as their male counterparts to survive in the sciences, and she hadn't just survived. She flourished. She ruled.

But that simply hadn't mattered, not to anyone, since the day of the accident. That one day erased everything she had ever worked for, until the Thing in her blood was the only thing that mattered.

It was overwhelming suddenly being offered everything that she had missed out on in the last few years, that she thought the Thing had taken from her. She wasn't sure she even knew how to be a scientist anymore. She had been sure that it would never again be more than a peripheral part of her life.

“ _If it helps,”_ came the precise accented voice from overhead, _“the private rooms are yours whether you accept the job or not. Mr. Stark has arranged for rooms to be constructed for all members of the Avengers Initiative.”_

She reached out, holding her breath as she touched her fingertips to the dark monitor of the hematology analyzer system. She swallowed. “What if I can't do this anymore?”

“ _Mr. Stark is a patient man,”_ JARVIS replied. Maybe it was her imagination, but his voice seemed softer somehow. _“But I doubt that will be a concern.”_

She smiled faintly. “You doubt it, huh?”

“ _Mr. Stark isn't the only one who has access to your research, Doctor.”_

She laughed, a little hoarse. “Did Stark program you with the ability to have faith in people you've barely met, or is that something else you taught yourself?”

“ _Does it matter?”_

“I suppose not.” She cast a smile upwards, though she wasn't sure where the AI's input sensors were located. “Thank you, JARVIS. Mind telling me how to get to Tony's offices?”

“ _My pleasure, doctor.”_

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter ended up being more character work than plot. I'm trying not to fall into the Rule 63 trap of either writing Bryce as so Brucey she might as well still be a dude, or making her so different that she's basically an OC with the last name Banner.
> 
> I welcome any and all comments and critiques about Bryce or the guys or the story itself. This is a new world for me. :)
> 
> Next chapter the shippy plotty goodness starts, promise.

Her 'rooms' turned on to be on the floor below Tony's private quarters. The elevators opened onto the same boring white-walled corridor going left and right, and to the right, behind a nondescript door with a control panel on the side...

Her space.

Well, not really her space, Tony's space. There was never any doubt of that in her mind. It was Tony's space in Tony's building in a city that Tony half-owned by now, and she wouldn't have a say if he decided tomorrow to take them back. Her being in those rooms was subject not to her actions, but the whims of Tony Stark. And, if JARVIS was right about his building rooms for all the Avengers, it also depended on her agreeing to play along with government-gathered collection of human weapons.

She had to keep reminding herself of that, because the temptation to believe that she actually had a place of her own was insidiously strong.

It didn't help that the rooms were incredibly, shockingly _perfect._ The same high ceilings as those luxurious suites upstairs, but other than that there was nothing in common between them. The walls were painted a darker shade of cream, almost golden, which made things feel more contained. There wasn't much decorating the walls, and what was there was rugged and tinged with African and Indian themes, South American patterns, rich, natural colors and rough wood. Across one wall of the front room, in sight as the doors first opened, was a mural of the continents fashioned like a map. The floors were bare wood (no doubt some expensive type of wood, but she didn't look too closely at it), with woven throw rugs placed around.

A bedroom with a low-sitting, heavy and dark framed bed, armchairs, a broad desk, a dressing area. A front room with a huge fireplace, a garishly big television that recessed back behind wooden panels to vanish from sight when it wasn't in use, bookshelves sitting almost bare and waiting to be filled. A bathroom, stone tile and inky black fixtures, luxurious but not the garish steel and marble modernity of the one that was in Pepper's rooms upstairs. Deep sunk tub, enclosed shower. A kitchen, small but well-stocked.

And in every room, a monitor that synced up with JARVIS and the Tower's central computer system. Even in the bathroom there was a monitor on an arm that could stretch to the bathtub (or toilet, she saw in amusement).

A closet full of clothes, which JARVIS assured her that Tony hadn't had any input in. He simply sent her measurements (which JARVIS admitted to supplying but insisted that his protocol involved detailed physical scans of every visitor to Mr. Stark's private rooms) to a few department stores and ordered up a full wardrobe.

Bryce signed the contract Tony put in front of her without even reading it. Of course she did; she was a wanted fugitive and property of the US Army, the idea of breaking a contract if it ended up backfiring on her was pretty mild in comparison.

She signed the contract, shook Tony's hand and ignored his pleased, smug grin. Then she vanished into those rooms, trying to tell herself that it was simply the nicest hotel she'd ever been invited to stay in for a while for free, and sat stiffly in an armchair for a good hour shuddering and ordering herself to not shed tears over any of it.

There was going to be a catch, somewhere. She couldn't relax, she couldn't accept all this, until she found that catch. And if it was something that she couldn't live with, she was going to have to walk away from this and back to her old life.

She had to stay prepared for that, because if she let herself believe that it wasn't going to happen then it would _break_ her when it inevitably did.

 

* * *

 

For the first few days in the Tower, Bryce felt the grip of uncertainty constantly. She spent hours down in 'her' labs, researching the equipment that filled it but refusing to even turn it on. She made lists – things she could use more of, things that were superfluous, experiments that she could complete with the equipment at hand – but actually attempting something would have felt like pushing her luck. She read archived journals, familiarized herself with advances made in physics and radiation research while she was off the grid and unable to stay informed.

She didn't turn on the television in her rooms. She used the computer, but that was it. She sat in the front room and stared up at the wall mural of the earth, letting her eyes trace paths that she'd taken in her travels. If this were her space, she might have bought pins and started marking the places where she had lived.

She wore the same outfit three days in a row. Nothing unusual for her; hell, these clothes were actually still relatively clean by the end of a day, so it was better than she was used to. She just couldn't bring herself to open those closets and dig in to the clothes someone else had bought and put there. She made herself small meals out of the food that stocked her little kitchen, drinking cup after cup of tea out of habit, to keep her stomach full. She slept lightly, in fits.

It was, all things told, the most nervous period of safety that she'd ever had, and she might have gone on hugging the shadows and taking up as little space as she could, but the world that she was trying so hard to block out inevitably came calling.

 

* * *

 

The churn of apprehension Bryce felt as the chime over the door beeped was almost washed away by the miserable, utterly hangdog look waiting for her as the door slid open.

Steve's shoulders were slumped, his entire bearing defeated, and when she emerged he thrust his hand towards her.

“I don't understand how this is a phone,” he all but wailed.

Bryce hadn't known how she would react to Steve when Natasha first told her that he was a part of this gathering crew. Captain America, after all, had been the inspiration behind her work with Ross and the Army. The hero whose legacy turned Bryce into a monster. Well, his legacy and a strong dose of her own hubris, but no need to get particular.

But in reality he was everything the stories said he would be, with the added bonus that he was also a warm, confused, uncertain, very much _human_ man. She liked Steve. She was impressed by Captain America, but she _liked_ Steve. If Bryce noticed how attractive he was (and she did, it was there to be seen), she pegged it to pure scientific observation.

So it was easy to push past her apprehension and take what he held out, the Stark-created smart phone that matched the one Tony had handed her after she signed her contract with him.

It was an impressive bit of tech, by all appearances just a phone-sized blank screen. Tony didn't bother giving her a lesson on it, though of course she had it figured out after a few minutes of playing around with it. She just assumed that Tony might have taken more time with a guy who was still used to rotary dials.

She took the phone and activated it just to make sure it wasn't broken, and Steve huffed out a little sound of annoyance when it lit up brightly for her and waited for input.

She couldn't help a laugh. “You didn't ask Tony to teach you?”

Steve met her eyes. “Tony,” he answered, “is not polite.”

An understatement, and she chuckled as she backed up and gestured him inside. “Come on, I'll give you a quick lesson.”

His footsteps were slow to catch up to her, and she glanced back from the display on the phone to see him looking around in interest.

“This is nice,” he said, his eyes catching on the map painted across the wall. He started drifting towards it, studying the world. “Have you been very many places, doctor?” he asked after a moment, his back to her. He clasped his hands behind his back, almost parade rest.

She wondered absently if it was soothing to him, the sight of the continents all laid out. A few of the names had changed since his time, but it was still the same world that he had grown up in. Still laid out in the old familiar way.

She looked from the solid plane of his back to the wall, and answered with a question of her own. “Have you? Outside of the war, I mean.”

“Does Stuttgart count?” His face angled towards Europe. “Sometimes I think I'd like it. Traveling. To the really far-off places, too, the exotics. The kind of places we wouldn't have thought of going to when I was growing up.” He angled himself more towards Africa. She couldn't see his face but his tone was almost bemused. “I never cared to travel before I got stuck in the ice. I wonder...”

Bryce was drawn in by the map and his soft words. She forgot the phone in her hand for a moment, looking over the dark swirls of oceans and the narrow earthy jags of Central America.

“Maybe because while you're here you're having to constantly reconcile what's around you now with what you remember growing up. It would be less exhausting, I would think, to go to a place that's so new that you'd have to learn it all as you went, with nothing to measure it against.”

Steve shifted, looking back at her. “That may be,” he answered slowly, as if chewing on the words and the thought behind them. “Is it the same for you?”

She looked over, surprised by that. “For me?”

His eyes...Bryce didn't think it was shallow of her to notice, particularly at that moment, how intent and vivid his eyes were. His face, his body, everything about him said that he was a physically perfect young soldier. Only his eyes seemed to show that he had lived ninety-something years and felt every last one of them.

Even as he studied her, his expression neutral and his voice mild, those eyes had a brightness, a focus, and it was hard to look away.

“Did you leave America because of the Hulk, or did you leave because life suddenly didn't resemble what it used to be?”

She smiled at that. It was sometimes easy to dismiss Steve as strategically brilliant but otherwise dim, but that was a mistake caused by the time displacement. What Steve didn't know was no statement on his intelligence, simply on the lessons he had missed out on.

Still, she looked back at the map and shook her head. “No,” she said without having to really think much about it. Self-reflection was like a second job for Bryce.

“I didn't leave because it was different. I left because it was the same.” She could feel Steve's eyes on her, but his silence was patient. “Imagine that the year 1945 was all around you, and everywhere you looked there was something familiar, but you couldn't actually reach out and take it.” She looked back at Steve. “The life I used to know is here. Everything I used to do, and be, and want for myself. It's everywhere around me. But I can't have it anymore. I left because being so close to it is like torture.”

His vivid eyes were soft as he nodded. Not understanding, she thought, but accepting.

She raised the phone and nodded him back towards the couch. “Come on. Lesson time, and I think I should be able to update the protocol of the phone's OS to maintain a display that will--

“Doctor, I can't even make it light up, I'm sure not gonna understand _how_ it lights up.”

“Noted.” She laughed, and the echo of his own quiet and rare chuckle was an added bonus.

It took a little bit longer than she thought – she couldn't take anything for granted during her explanations, and she was too prone to using jargon and going into too much detail. But in the next couple of hours he learned to pull up the phone's menu displays and switch from the dial pad to the web browser, and how to navigate in each. The phone was capable of other things, but Steve's heart wasn't in gadgets so those would be wasted lessons.

After they finished up the lesson (and after they agreed on another soon for the computer displays), she walked Steve to the door. He stopped a few steps away, though.

“I don't mean to pry, doctor...”

“Bryce,” she said in the pause. “Just Bryce is fine, Steve.”

He seemed to almost dust a shade of pink at that, but he nodded. “Bryce,” he repeated. “Not to pry, but we've been wondering why you haven't joined us upstairs at all.”

“Upstairs?”

“In Tony's parlor. Thor is gone, but Agents Barton and Romanoff have been coming for dinner when they can, or at times it's just Tony and me.” Steve smiled uncertainly. “As Tony told me, the kitchens in these rooms weren't really built for cooking. And it's good to have company. Tony said that he made the offer to you...?”

She nodded, vaguely remembering Tony mentioning something about evenings and dinners after she signed the contract. She had been too busy reeling from it all to pay much attention.

“I'm still getting used to...all of this,” she answered slowly. “It's a lot. Just give me some time?”

He met her eyes, then nodded with a smile. “Not too much time, I hope. Company in nice in general, and I enjoy your company a lot.”

He turned away fast after that and moved out the door without looking back.

The door slid shut behind him, and Bryce turned. She regarded the inside of her quiet rooms, the self-contained space that she was being allowed to exist in for the moment.

And in the echo of Steve's company and his parting words, it occurred to her that maybe she being a little ridiculous letting her uncertainty rule her.

 

* * *

 

The next morning she woke up with the rise of the sun, having left the drapes open in the bedroom. She took a long shower, then went to the closet to sift through the ridiculous amount of clothes waiting for her.

A pair of jeans slid on like they were tailored for her (and of course they probably had been, rich people did that kind of thing, right?). She found a collection of camisoles and pulled out a dark one, and a cropped sweater to wear over it.

Fitted clothes were a rarity. In fact even when she could get them she rarely did, needing her clothes too badly to risk the Thing tearing them from her. Shirts she tended to buy bulky and cheap, since there was never much hope of salvaging them, and she wore elastic-waisted skirts, maternity pants, whatever she could find that would have a chance at surviving if the Thing broke loose.

When she caught sight of herself in the mirror as she went back to the bathroom, she was taken aback at what she saw. The austerity of her past few years left her feeling thin and fragile and weedy more often than not, but a set of expensive tailored clothes did wonders for making her look trim and stylish instead.

She wasn't used to this side of life – mirrors and clothes and style choices. Aesthetics simply didn't play a part in her life. It felt strange to regard her tired face in the mirror and watch as she lifted a brush and ran it through her always-hectic curls.

She looked forty and worn down, at least to her own eyes she did. A pair of tailored jeans didn't hide the affects of running, of years of loneliness and fear, or her whole wrecked life even before the accident. But those things...they stayed behind her eyes. She otherwise looked, for once, like a regular person living a normal life.

She could see the changes on her face since the last time she'd really bothered to stare into a mirror and take stock, almost a decade before. There were lines around her eyes, around her mouth. She was darker from years under the sun, but in some ways there was a softness there that hadn't been there before. When she was thirty, working for the military, constantly pushing to prove herself, she'd been a wired-up ball of tension. Before that, in school for any of her PhDs, she'd been much the same way.

As a teenager she was a defiant mass of arrogant intelligence. She'd been a scared and hollowed-out shell of a child before that, whether she was hiding bruises and cuts from her father or later hiding the shame of being a battered, unwanted foster child with her only remaining parent sitting in an mental institution for criminals.

She was worn now, older, but she was relaxed in a way that she never had been before. There was a peaceful set to her mouth now, a clarity in her eyes. She could meet her own gaze in the mirror, maybe for the first time. It wasn't about the fit of her clothes, it was about being comfortable in her own skin.

She felt good walking out of that bathroom. She still had nothing to her name, living on the whims of a brilliant billionaire, but inside her skin, where it counted, she felt at peace enough to be able to handle it.

Before she could head out the door and see if her newly-felt sense of peace extended down into her lab, there was a chirp from overhead, and JARVIS's cool voice.

“ _Doctor Banner, Mr. Stark is requesting a word.”_

She bit back surprise that Tony was even awake that early. “Right. Patch him through, or whatever you do. Thanks.”

“ _Hey, doc, are you working on anything you can't walk away from for a few hours?”_

Bryce thought about her silent lab full of powered-down equipment and felt a twist of guilt. “Not really,” she answered simply.

“ _Look, come help me out with something in the workshop. I'm having a power problem, I need a second set of eyes.”_

“I think I can manage that,” she answered.

 

* * *

 

She had been through Tony's workshops before on his first-day tour, listening to his proud descriptions of all the neat and still and quiet equipment.

The workshop with Tony actually working in it was an entirely different thing.

The air smelled like coffee and the iron tang of lased metal. The robots that had been quiet and still while she toured were all out in the middle of the floor, poised and waiting. The surfaces were a mix of equation-filled monitors and 3-D virtual displays of equipment and molecular compositions.

Much more interesting that way, at least to her eyes. She hadn't been able to put a purpose to half the equipment in there during the tour, given her outdated applied sciences background, but seeing things up and operational put them in context for her.

She moved in and looked around at the displays, spotting Tony's dark hair in the middle of his robot cluster. “Should I have worn a hard-hat?”

His head popped up from the circle of robot helpers like a prairie dog in tall grass. “Oh, hey, you got here quick.” His eyes widened and his mouth slid into a smile. “Oh, _hey,_ ” he said again. “Did I buy you that outfit? Is that one of mine?”

She rolled her eyes and ignored the heat rising to her face. “They're all one of yours, Tony. At least until I earn my first paycheck and reimburse you for them.”

“Is it worth mentioning that I'd rather you didn't?”

“Not in the least.” She smiled politely and turned her eyes to the displays glowing blue around her. “Now, what's this power issue that you somehow think I'm going to be able to...”

Her voice trailed off as she focused on a certain display.

Vibranium.

She'd read about it on a dingy laptop screen between brown-outs in Somalia, before her travels took her to India. Tony had released information saying that the element now existed but didn't provide many details. Though people tended not to underestimate Tony Stark's abilities, the reaction in scientific circles had mostly been a lot of outraged scientists doubting the ability to create a new element using the kind of particle accelerator that a man could build in his home. No one doubted the element existed, the doubt seemed to be focused on how he created it and whether he embellished stories to make his reputation inflate that much more.

Bryce couldn't have cared less about reputations or the details of anecdotes about how discoveries were made. The discovery was the thing that mattered.

She turned the monitor towards her and studied the composition of the element. “Is it the arc reactor that you're having problems with?”

“'Problem' might have been an overstatement,” Tony admitted from across the room. “The suit reactors are about 5000 times as efficient as the first one I created. Trouble is, all my calculations suggest that it should be more efficient times about 50 thou. So somewhere along the way the reactors in the suits are getting dampened.”

She nodded absently, studying the calculations and the characteristics of the element that he had measured so far.

“I've been bothered by it since the new suit first came online, but this is the first time I've had time to really dig in to it.”

“What were you using as the core before this?”

“Palladium.”

She looked over, but he was hidden in the cluster of robots again. “Palladium.”

“Mmm.”

“Did you read too many Red Scare comics as a teenager?” She turned bemused eyes back to the monitor. “Or did the reactor come out of cold fusion research?”

He didn't answer, but she didn't really need him to. She pulled up a display comparing the characteristics of palladium with the vibranium he was using now and settled in to work out some equations.

After a few minutes she looked from the monitor back to the cluster of robots. Whatever he was working on apparently involved a laser cutter and frequent cursing under his breath. She could see glimpses of him, a pair of safety goggles making his hair look ridiculous. Dressed in what looked like a sleeveless black undershirt, sweating from exertion as he directed the portable laser saw clutched in both hands.

He was in better shape than she would have thought. Those tailored suits of his hid muscle she wouldn't have expected.

God, she was ridiculous. What was it about suddenly being in this Tower with these men that made her so prone to blushing every five minutes? She wasn't a particularly hormone-addled woman and never had been: whatever biological clock she'd ever had was probably irradiated out of her.

She just wasn't used to it. That had to be it. She wasn't used to relating to people, to men, on a personal level. It had been years since she'd allowed herself more than small talk with a passing stranger. She just had to readjust her expectations, and she'd be fine.

“What do you think?”

She blinked suddenly when she realized he had paused his work and was looking back at her. Flushing, she jerked her eyes away from him and turned back to the monitor.

“You want to know if I've solved your power problem five minutes into researching it?” she replied, trying for droll and failing miserably.

There was a pause, and a shift. A heavy clank as the laser cutter was put down. “Move it, guys, take a break. Ten minutes.” There were soft whirrs and clicks as his robot crew shifted and split up.

Her flush only got worse when she realized he was coming over. She still wasn't adjusted to the idea of people engaging her in personal conversations; she seriously wasn't equipped to handle his innuendo-laden form of communication.

His footsteps took him behind her a good few feet, and then past her. She sat still, making a decided effort not to look back at him. Palladium. Vibranium. Stifled power. Focus.

Luckily she spotted something in her study of a display of the palladium core that he used to use, and her focus actually did beam in. She pulled up a display of the new vibranium core and the calculations behind it, and felt a twist in her gut.

“Zero point,” she murmured, tracing her hand over the equations that charted how the power held inside the reactor was communicated to the suit itself.

Excitement. Hypothesis. A possibility. It was the greatest thing about her work, that little burst of energy when a possible solution or even a possible problem was spotted. The tiny flush of adrenaline was so familiar in such an old, dusty way that she suddenly felt like she was back in the lab at Culver.

She almost expected Betty to answer her.

“Mmm? You have a question about--?” Tony, now holding a cup of coffee, approached her from the side. Whatever he saw in her face made him chuckle. “No, Christ, you really have spotted something already, haven't you?”

She twisted on the stood she'd perched on, twisting the monitor to face him. “You're still using the Hamiltonian calculated from the core when it was palladium. The reactor thinks its ground state is still the same. The suit can handle the power from the new core but it _expects_ the same levels it used to get.”

Her mind raced ahead, old knowledge forming steps of logic in the dusty cobwebbed pathways her brain used to constantly travel down. “You've been on permanent overload since you switched cores. The suit hasn't noticed anything wrong since the power that you're getting is still within the high limits of potential power that the reactor was originally designed to send out. In fact, the suit itself appears to be keeping it within those limits. That's where your power discrepancy might be.”

She looked over in time to see Tony's amused expression vanish as he leaned in and looked over his own calculations. He slid on to the stool beside hers and drew the display closer, brow furrowed as his eyes swept the calculations.

“Son of a bitch,” he murmured after a few seconds. He looked over at her, the same little spark in his eyes that she could feel herself.

The discoveries, the moments like these. They had always been the best part of what she did.

“You're really a genius, doc.”

“Just a fresh pair of eyes, like you said.” She spotted the calculations, but he made them in the first place. Getting that inside look at the core and the reactor and how it worked was a solid reminder that Tony Stark had to be one of the top two or three minds in the world. The man earned every bit of the smugness he broadcasted so clearly.

With deft fingers Tony highlighted the offending equations and drew them out into a separate free-form display. That done, he twisted to look back at her, grinning broadly. “I was thinking I'd have to rebuild the reactors around the core. Congratulations, doc, you just more than earned your first month's salary.”

She smiled faintly, but the words were a relief considering her earlier fears about not quite being the scientist that she used to be, and not worth the money he'd be paying her. In fact, now that she'd felt that old spark of discovery and had a chance to flip that switch in her mind, she was suddenly a little eager to get back up to her lab and fire up some of those machines.

Tony pushed the monitor back and turned to her suddenly, lofting his coffee. “Steve says you two talked a bit last night.”

She blinked at the sudden subject change. “You didn't teach the man how to use his phone, Tony.”

He grinned. “He's cute when he's confused. Anyway, it's good for him. Keeps him humble. He says you might stop being a hermit one of these days.”

She shrugged, but felt that same flush of sheepishness. “I'm getting there.”

He sipped his coffee, eyes on her thoughtfully. “You know if there's anything you need...”

Bryce laughed wryly. “I need to get used to this idea that I can actually get the things I need all the sudden.”

He nodded after a moment. “I get the feeling those files SHIELD has on you might be missing a few details. Been a rough few years, I'm guessing?”

She snorted, but slid off the stool and away from that counter. “I'm used to rough. This...” she gestured around at the workshop, the Tower, the universe around them all locked in chrome and steel and filled with riches of all kinds. “This I'm not used to.”

Tony glanced around as she gestured, but nodded after a moment. He turned back to the screen in front of him, the calculations. He reached out suddenly with his free hand and closed his fingers around the vibranium core displayed in vivid 3-D. He lofted it, holding it out towards her.

“This is the only thing here that actually matters. This is why I need you, doc. My suit, your condition, Steve's shield, Thor's Hammer, the Leather Twins' armor. We can study it, fix it. We can make it better, fight with it when we need to, and then we can spread it out to the people in the world who will use it the right way. The rest of it, the private rooms and the wardrobe and everything, it's set dressing. I brought you here to work, and to fight beside the rest of us. Remember that, and maybe the rest won't seem so important.”

She met his eyes, and after a moment she nodded. Work and fight. She could do that. She could ignore the atmosphere, the strangeness of luxury and silence and security, of knowing where she was when she woke in the morning. When it became too much, she could just focus on the work, and the fight.

That was her entire life, after all.  


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, it's pretty safe to say I got stuck big time on this one. I wanted to plow right on to the good stuff but felt like there was more lead-in required. So this is more lead-in. I'm not entirely pleased with it, but it introduces things important to the plot. Expect the next chapter much faster, since the good plotty smutty stuff is dead ahead. 
> 
> Warning: mention of past child abuse in this chapter.

Her father used to tell her that it was her fault for being born a girl. He wanted a son, he would say, belt in his hand or backhand cocked and ready to fly. That was all he wanted if he had to have a child: a boy, a brilliant boy to carry on his name and his work.

Her mom would sit with her after he was asleep, pressing a damp washcloth over her wounds if she was bleeding, smoothing Bryce's curls out of her face and regarding her with something like affection.

“Don't listen to him,” she would whisper, words staccato, always braced and ready to move if she heard him stirring in the other room. “It's not because you're a girl. He would have hated you no matter what.”

Women were weak, her father insisted, even when he was sober and simply disgusted, not actually violent. His wife had been different. She had been beautiful and perfect and strong, but now that she had given birth to this useless daughter and spent all her time taking care of her, even she was tainted. Even she was no good anymore.

Bryce had ruined her mother, and so Bryce had to pay for it.

She learned two valuable lessons from her childhood, from the beatings from her father, and the soothing almost-love from her mother, the time spent in hospitals, the moment of her mother's death. Two lessons that stood above everything else and stayed strong in her mind all through her life:

One, that the worst thing a woman could be was weak. And two, that the people who were most supposed to love you never really did.

 

* * *

 

 

If Bryce was anything after the last few years, she was adaptable.

After the first uncertain days at the Tower she fell into a rhythm. She spent most waking hours in her lab or in Tony's workshop, doing everything from analysis of her own blood to helping Tony perfect the carbon nanotube foam that served as impact cushioning inside of his suit. (Any thicker and the suit would have to be modified, but at the current density he was still, as he said, walking away from the really tough fights feeling like a pan of scrambled eggs.)

She started going upstairs for dinner in the hours after finishing up the day's work. Luckily Tony didn't keep any kind of regular schedule himself, so 'dinner' as Steve described it was an informal event that consisted of whoever was hungry grabbing food from Tony's vastly-more-lavish kitchen and then sitting in that huge airy den with whoever else was there.

She discovered during those evenings that Steve was interested in art, that he and Tony could actually have long, entirely civil conversations about different pre-40s artists and their techniques. They could actually have long, civil conversations about a lot of things. She liked Clint and Natasha, but on the evenings when one or both of them were there she noticed that the dynamics between Tony and Steve felt different. Less easy. When other people were there one of them had to be in charge, and the other usually butted up against them.

But when they were alone, at least alone with Bryce in the room, they were equals. Tony's constant mockery eased back into gentle teasing, and Steve's frustration melted into bemused interest.

Bryce couldn't add much to the discussions, but she enjoyed sitting back and listening. They were fascinating men, both of them, and spending time with them was as interesting as the time she spent in her lab working.

She found herself thinking about them a lot. Partly because she spent hours working on Tony's projects, and because her blood work in the labs made her think of the original Captain America serum research she had done before her accident. But more than that were the times when she'd find herself thinking gentle thoughts about the way Steve's smiles were starting to soften and grow broader, more young than they had been. Or Tony, his casual generosity, his acceptance of everyone that was so easy she could see why some people mistook it as dismissive.

She settled into those warm and increasingly frequent thoughts of the two men the way she settled into everything else in that Tower.: mostly unconsciously. If she thought about it with any real self-awareness then she started to get paranoid and itch to vanish from all this friendship and security before it inevitably got jerked away from her.

 

* * *

 

 

She didn't actually notice that anything was unusual until the day she finally felt comfortable enough to risk sending an email to Betty Ross.

Two short and excited exchanges later, Betty demanded a Skype session. Bryce found herself sitting in her lab and grinning as JARVIS displayed the session on a monitor wide enough that Betty was almost life-sized in front of her.

“ _Your hair!”_ was Betty's first greeting, dismay in her voice that was barely audible through her happiness. Betty of course looked exactly the same, gorgeous and bright-eyed and brilliant.

Bryce ran fingers through her cropped, ruffled curls and shrugged. “It was too hard to deal with while I was traveling,” she said simply, before sending Betty a curious look through the screen. “You don't seem all that shocked to hear from me.”

Betty's lips pursed and she gave Bryce a painfully familiar wry look _. “Everyone in the world knows all about the alien invasion in New York. You think I didn't recognize that Hulk in all the videos? I didn't want to risk trying to get in touch if you weren't safe. I assume it's safe now, or you wouldn't have contacted me?”_

“Safe enough.” Bryce didn't bother to specify the whys and wheres, which she knew Betty would understand. Betty had no relationship with her father anymore, but there was still too much risk in her knowing details about Bryce. It was why Bryce had only sent the occasional email from dummy accounts during her travels, only when passing through larger cities in case those emails were ever traced back enough to get a location.

Betty's bright smile returned just like that. _“Well, you look great. Too thin, I don't know if I like that, but at least you're not wearing rags like you were last time I saw you.”_

Bryce didn't bother explaining Tony Stark's wardrobe-purchasing habits either. “You too,” she said simply, regarding her best friend's image in the display fondly. “Are you married yet?”

Betty held up her hand, ring set glistening clearly on JARVIS's sharp display. “ _I wrote out an invitation for you that never got sent,_ ” she said. “ _I keep it with the photo album._ ”

Bryce smiled sincerely. Her first time glimpsing Betty's fiance had led to his calling the Army on her, but he had come around after the display on Culver's campus, after Bryce – the Thing - saved Betty's life.

“You look happy,” she said after a moment, glad for it.

“ _I am now.”_ Betty smiled, graceful as ever. _“I'm working on the most fascinating project, and now you're here and alive with your Orphan Annie haircut.”_

Bryce made a face at the screen, and of course – them being who they were – ignored the rest to focus on that fascinating project she mentioned.

Betty spent a good twenty minutes excitedly filling Bryce in on the work she was doing for Culver. The school, after a lightning-fast process, won one of about a dozen grants given in the US to study the physiology of the remains of the Chitauri army. They were working in conjunction with a US Army project (Betty had been vehement from the start that her father not be anywhere close to it), to profile everything they could about the biological makeup of the alien army and what it told them about the world the Chitauri had come from.

“ _There are a few groups in France and China leading huge projects, and smaller ones in about twenty other countries. It's amazing. I've never worked on anything with this degree of communication and cooperation before. Say what you want for old fifties sci-fi movies, but the idea that an alien invasion could unite the nations of earth was pretty spot-on. At least so far.”_ She paused to send a narrow-eyed look at the camera on her laptop. _“Though from what I can tell not one of those other countries was given access to any of the technology the aliens left behind.”_

Bryce laughed, not at all surprised after the way SHIELD had converged on Stark Tower the day of the attack and went scrap-hunting for weapons and airships.

“Don't look at me, I don't have any laying around.” Tony, maybe. SHIELD, definitely. Bryce, no.

Betty smiled after a moment. _“Well, what are you working on these days, then? Something big, I can tell.”_

“No, actually. Not really anything in particular. I have a list of projects to start, but...”

“ _Is there some secrecy issue? You can just tell me if it's classified, you know I understand things like that.”_

Bryce laughed. “No. There's honestly nothing. I just reached civilization after years living in huts, what do you think I'd be working on?”

Betty just shook her head. “ _I don't believe it. You, lady, are_ glowing. _You have been for this whole conversation. I know you: that comes from having a project. You haven't looked like this since we first started working on the serum project.”_

Bryce blinked, surprised, resisting looking down at herself as if she'd be able to see what Betty was talking about.

“ _If you were anyone else, I would ask what his name is.”_ Betty studied Bryce for a moment, and her eyes widened. “ _Wait. Oh my god, is that it?”_

Tony and Steve both filled her thoughts, but Bryce shook them away. “There's no 'him', Betty,” she answered fast, but her cheeks were heating unconsciously. “Maybe it's just nice to know where I am when I wake up in the morning. I'm enjoying it, I guess.”

Betty sighed, but smiled a moment later. “ _Are you okay? Really? You're in a good place?”_

Bryce opened her mouth to answer, but got stuck in thoughts about Tony's incredible generosity, and Steve's shy attempts to make her more social. The other Avengers and their easy acceptance of the thing that had made Bryce a pariah for years. The lab humming behind her, the private rooms upstairs. How it felt to have conversations again, to use her knowledge, to feel like she was a part of something.

A good place. It seemed like an understatement.

“ _God, look at you. You don't even have to answer the question, I can see it all over your face.”_ Betty laughed, but it was soft and kind. _“I'm glad you're happy, Bryce. You deserve it. More than anyone I've ever known you deserve a break. Whatever it is that's making you happy, just hold on to it.”_

They talked a while longer, about Betty's work mapping out the genetics of an alien species, and Bryce's plans to revisit the serum work and see if there wasn't a cure out there somewhere for the monster in her blood.

But after the talk was over, after swearing up and down to stay in frequent touch with Betty, Bryce found herself thinking back on those moments. Betty's insistence that she was glowing and happy, and the way her mind had gone immediately to the faces of the two men she saw most these days.

It wasn't in her nature to think of men in those terms. Betty was right that it had never been the company of another person that made her glow. It was always the work that made her happiest. But since settling in to the Tower and getting used to the strangeness of peace, Bryce's main focus wasn't on the lab and the projects that she had listed out.

Despite all the hours she worked every day, her thoughts tended to be on her new friends more than the work itself.

If that meant something she wasn't sure she wanted to know what it was. She knew how to work, she knew how to research and spend hours in labs. She'd forgotten a bit, but she was getting back into the swing of things.

Being with people, with attractive and intelligent men who made her blush...she had never known how to do that. She wasn't that person, and she was too old to try to turn herself into something that she wasn't.

 

* * *

 

 

Of course once the observation was made and the hypothesis was formed, Bryce couldn't help but be aware of the people she was living with in a way she hadn't been before the conversation with Betty.

She would have to be even more socially inept than she was not to notice that Tony flirted. But Tony was Tony – he flirted with particularly well-shaped fruit, much less every single person he came across. Tony giving her a wink and a grin and that up and down sweep of the eyes was common, and since she'd seen him do much the same to his own reflection in a mirror she chose not to read much into it.

Steve was harder to read. Steve – whose rooms it turned out were on the same level as Bryce's, taking up the other half of the wing – always smiled when he saw her, always greeted her with a respectful 'doctor' though he had full permission to use her first name.

He didn't speak about personal things to the point that Tony did, but they sat together up in that spacious parlor of Tony's and had long conversations about trying to fit back in to a world they weren't sure they belonged in, and she felt a strong sense of kinship with him. He was strong and confident in the things he knew, and he was learning the modern world at an impressive clip.

Though he seemed to pick up the technology of the modern age more readily than some of the social changes. He wasn't shy to ask about the things he didn't understand, though, no matter how potentially embarrassing. He wasn't at all bashful or timid, as some people thought he was.

“I can't help but notice this preoccupation with sex everywhere,” he mentioned one evening when it was just the two of them, Tony having flown out to Malibu to see to some business or other. They were watching television, and as usual for every product sold on commercials there was a beautiful, willowy woman pouting at the cameras.

Steve gestured at it as he talked, at a commercial for a fast food place that featured a woman basically fellating a burger while she writhed on a car. Bryce hummed her agreement, wondering idly if the actress felt ridiculous filming that or if she was as bemused by the whole thing as Steve seemed to be.

“It's strange,” Steve went on. “Compared to what I grew up with, sex is everywhere now. But at the same time the attitude towards sex itself hadn't really changed all that much. It's as if everyone these days is supposed to want it every minute of every day, but actually _having_ sex is frowned on and should be kept behind closed doors and never talked about with anyone.”

Bryce thought about that. “Well, we've come a long way from sitcoms that showed a married couple sleeping in two twin beds, but to a point I think you're right. At least in that we take for granted this constant exposure to--”

“Let me ask you something,” Steve said, the words a sudden blurt. Like he'd been holding on to it for a while and had been waiting for a chance to let it out.

He wasn't the kind to normally interrupt anyone (except Tony), which caught Bryce's attention. “Mm?”

Steve was watching the television, much more intently than he had been a moment ago. “What would the reaction these days be to a couple with a gap in ages?”

Bryce blinked, but shrugged. “It happens. Popular theory is that there's usually money involved somehow. A rich old man and a younger woman, for instance.”

“What about me?” Steve asked, still staring straight at the TV as if he couldn't miss a moment of CNN's coverage of an earthquake in the Philippines. “If someone like me were to date...well, someone your age.”

She opened her mouth and shut it, and ignored the irritatingly familiar warmth moving to her cheeks. “Steve. I'm almost twice your age.”

“You're nowhere close to that,” he corrected instantly. “But even so, I'm more than twice _your_ age.”

Bryce couldn't help a laugh. “I guess that's true. Well. I don't have money, and typically the age difference falls the opposite way, but it isn't unthinkable.”

Steve faltered then, his eyes sliding over to her hesitantly. “No?”

Bryce looked away, unable to read the brightness in his eyes and the warmth of hope in his voice.

“They won't kick you out of the country for taking an older lover. I promise.”

Steve looked away again – she could feel, without looking, the moment his gaze left her and went back to the television – and they sat in silence for a while, until the next set of commercials brought more question and answer.

 

* * *

 

 

A couple of days after that talk with Steve Tony was fresh back from Malibu, looking tan and relaxed and full of ideas for testing out that impact foam he and Bryce were perfecting for the Iron Man suits.

Working with Tony was a nonstop learning process, with his engineering knowledge fitting with her own theoretical physics background surprisingly well. They complimented each other, one of them usually able to pick up where the other one's knowledge started getting limited. It was exciting, and Bryce knew she was lucky to have it: a coworker – a boss, technically – who actually valued her knowledge, who didn't see her as some kind of competition. Tony had no trouble admitting where the holes in his knowledge were, which was a rarity among brilliant men. Particularly egotistical brilliant men. He relied on her to fill in the gaps instead of resenting the things that she knew and could figure out that he couldn't.

She could lose hours working down in Tony's lab, calling out bad physics jokes to him as he got dirty with his robots and torches, or half-listening to his own chatter as she worked on the formulas to feed JARVIS for different simulations on weight and density impact on the Iron Man suits given the changes they were making.

Most days Bryce would have rather been in Tony's lab than her own, and she wasn't sure what to make of that, except for the possibility that solitude had simply become harder to bear now that she was getting used to company.

That day after Tony's return from California was a great day, progress-wise, but mostly unremarkable until the point when they were both stretching and sore and ready to get upstairs and listen to Steve's lectures about skipping meals.

That was when Tony asked, out of nowhere, “What did you think about Pepper's rooms the night you spent there?”

Bryce, who was peeling off her lab coat and still lost in impact recovery formulas in her mind, had to take a good five seconds to figure out an answer to that. “They were...nice?”

Tony grinned, grease on his face and his hair disheveled and sweaty. “You sure?”

Bryce shrugged. “Not really my style, but I'm sure they'd fit in some interior design magazine. Why?”

“They're bigger than the rooms you've got now. And no longer occupied. Figured I'd see if you wanted to move before I tried to find some alternate use for them.”

Bryce had no idea how to navigate that bit of news. “You're buying Pepper her own home?” she asked finally, leaning on the nearest clean counter and watching Tony finish putting his tools away.

“She can buy her own if she wants one, she earns enough. But either way she's gonna base out of LA and Paris from now on.” Tony glanced over at her, by all appearances entirely casual. “Neither of us are very good at that post-relationship _thing_. So distance is easier.”

Bryce raised her eyebrows, both from the news and the way Tony seemed to be watching for her reaction to the news. “I'm sorry?”

He shrugged, looking away and shoving at the robot he seemed to have officially named Dummy when it got in his way. “Better for everyone, really.”

“Is it?”

He grabbed a rag and swiped at grease on his arm. “You want the whole story?”

Bryce hesitated.

If it was anyone but Tony she would have begged off. She didn't do well with personal things, commiserating with broken hearts or mustering up anger on behalf of a wronged friend. She felt it, the anger, the sorrow, but expressing it was never one of her better skills.

But it occurred to her that Tony hung around with her and with Steve, and...that was about it. He had a friend in the Air Force, someone Bryce hadn't met but who Tony talked about like an old friend. But the military friend had apparently been busy every waking moment since the Chitauri invasion, and maybe it was easier for a guy to talk about something like this with a woman?

Either way, if Tony was offering the information it probably meant that he needed to talk about it. So she braced herself, hoped she wouldn't screw it up, and answered.

“Sure. Tell me the story.”

Tony smiled over at her, and if it was strained at all she couldn't tell. “Actually it's not much of a story. Me and Pepper...we work really well at the things we get right. She's a great CEO. She keeps my ass in line, I keep her on her toes. We get along that way. But the bigger things...” He shrugged, balling the rag up in his hands, thoughtful. “I always had a feeling that she preferred me as I used to be. Not the weapon-making and the megalomania, but the businessman.”

He wandered towards her, tossing the dirty rag over Dummy's extended arm. The robot chittered in its disconcertingly organic way and turned, rolling off to dispose of it.

“I had to convince her to stay when I first put on the suit and started using it to help people,” Tony went on. “I couldn't drag her mind away from business enough to listen to me when I was trying to tell her about...well, something I went through a while back, something pretty bad. And this last battle, the Chitauri...” He hesitated and for the first time in the conversation seemed uncertain. “I have a hard time not resenting the fact that when I was riding a missile to what should have been my death, she didn't pick up her phone. It's not fair, but it's there. And it has an impact.”

Bryce nodded slowly, trying not to grimace at the reminder of the battle, the huge way that Tony nearly died without Bryce even being in her right mind enough to witness it.

“I think she figured the suit would be a phase,” Tony went on, leaning against the counter on the opposite side of Bryce. “Now that she knows it's not, she's happier going back to our old relationship.”

“Did she...?”

“She would have, sooner or later. But no, it was my decision.” He gestured back at the half-dissected version of the Mark Nine that they were working on. “This is who I am now. It's the best part of me. It's not a hobby, it's not a secret identity that I want to take off whenever I can. The people closest to me have to be okay with that. Hell, I'd think it's one of the things they should like most about me.”

Bryce smiled faintly, glancing at the bits of armor and the sheets of experimental compression foam. “I thought that too, at first. But it turns out I like you just as much outside the suit.”

There was a pause.

Bryce glanced back at Tony, and straightened unconsciously when she found his eyes on her, bright and intent. He studied her as if looking for one particular thing, and it unnerved her that she had no idea what that thing might be.

“There was a second reason for ending things with Pep,” he said after a moment, his voice casual but his eyes still steady on her. “Maybe a bigger reason.”

She had a hard time not flushing with those eyes on her. There was something disconcerting about Tony's ability to focus in like the most precise laser beam. “What's that?”

“Lately it's been harder and harder to keep my focus from wandering to someone else.”

Bryce's throat worked. She felt short of breath in the spotlight of his eyes.

“Oh?” she answered awkwardly.

Tony broke into a broad smile the next moment. He pushed away from the counter, obviously satisfied with whatever he'd been looking for so hard.

“Yep. And despite what rumors might say about my philandering ways, I've never been dishonest. I figure if my interest isn't in Pepper any more, it's dishonest to hold on to a relationship.”

Bryce followed slowly as he headed for the door. Upstairs: food, small talk, TV, lessons on the 21st century with Steve. Nothing had changed about any of that. Nothing changed, even though she felt oddly like the ground under her feet was tilted in some new direction.

“That's very mature of you,” she said, her voice only a little unsteady. “So I assume you want me to keep that part to myself.”

He chuckled and led the way out to the elevator. “I'd appreciate that. I've worked hard for my horrible reputation.”

She returned the smile when he grinned back at her, and as they got on the elevator to head up to dinner, and Steve, Bryce found herself unable to _stop_ smiling.

 

***

 

As she lay in bed that night trying to shut her brain off enough to sleep, she found herself smiling all over again. The talk with Tony she couldn't stop turning over in her mind, along with her last serious talk with Steve about the appropriateness of his possibly getting involved with someone her age.

It wasn't that someone was apparently interested in her. It was that she was spending her life suddenly with the two most remarkable men she had ever met, and in some insane twist of fate they _both_ seemed to be interested in her.

She wanted to get Betty on the phone, on Skype, whatever. She wanted to ask someone who understood her how exactly she was supposed to react to all this. How did people do it? How did she, forty years old, worn down and cynical with so much mileage, attempt to turn herself into someone more normal?

It wasn't like she was a virgin, though her experiences with romance had been...incidental. Perfunctory. She had dated at times when it felt like it was expected, had sex when it felt like it was time. Nothing worth mentioning, no names worth remembering. Her only truly meaningful relationship in the last twenty years was with Betty Ross.

It seemed absurd to her, intellectually, that after the last unbelievable decade of her life she would find herself so affected by a couple of men. She didn't feel particularly addled, she didn't think she was trying to recover some giggling youth that she'd never had. But she also couldn't focus on the thing that she had always put first in her life: the work.

She kept thinking about the curve of Tony's smile, and the glitter of emotions in Steve's expressive eyes. Tony's work, exciting and beautiful as it was to her. The old-fashioned respect Steve had for her since they first met, unlike any other man she had ever known. Steve's endless curiosity about the modern world, and Tony's confidence that he had everything absolutely figured out.

Bryce was in a place and in a position to focus on herself. To dive back into gamma radiation studies, to track down the errors she had made that caused the accident. To cure herself, possibly, of the Thing that made her life hell.

But her loud nuisance of a brain refused to focus. And if she was right, if Steve Rogers and Tony Stark were both somehow interested in her of all people, what then?

Would they ask her out? Compete with each other? Would she be asked to choose between them?

She tried to sleep, but every time her eyes closed she found herself picturing possible moments. Sitting across a candle-lit table, Tony holding her hand as they talked. Steve blushing as he slid an arm around her shoulder while they sat on the couch and watched a movie. Sneaking kisses in the lab between tests, between theories bandied back and forth between her and Tony. Steve teaching her some forties dance step, arms tight around her, bodies moving together.

Her daydreams were ridiculous. Old-fashioned and childish, and she couldn't turn them off. She wasn't sure she wanted to. There was something about believing that she was actually desirable, something as hypnotic as the feeling of finally being safe. There was a wild kind of joy in the idea that she could desire someone back – God, _two_ someones – enough to make her smile into the darkness and blush into her pillow.

She felt silly, girlish and un-serious, and it was a strange kind of luxury among all the other riches she was getting used to.

 

* * *

 

 

But fate had never been kind enough to let Bryce Banner hold on to her delusions for very long.

It was slow to strike in this case, allowing her that strange, happy day before it slammed her back to earth. She forgot herself that day. She forgot the lessons that she had held on to since childhood. She forgot the things that had kept her alive for so long despite the odds against her, despite her being alone and pennyless and on the run in some of the worst places in the world.

She forgot those old truths beaten into her as a child, first by her father and then by life itself in a hundred different ways. That women were weak, that their weakness was the worst thing about them. About _her._ And that the people she most thought she could trust would always make her pay for that trust. The ones who should have cared never actually did.

Fate was slow this time around, but the day after talking to Tony and convincing herself that she was actually allowed to be a normal woman, it caught up to her.  


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last, plot creeps in. One more chapter until the beginnings of smut.

Bryce fell asleep the night before smiling into the darkness, feeling optimistic, giddy. Hopeful. She woke up the next day and all that odd, uncharacteristic optimism was sitting right there waiting for her.

She took a long, lazy shower, thinking languorous thoughts about what it might feel like to have someone else's touch against her skin. Steve's large, strong hands. Tony's clever long fingers. She tried not to focus on it, but the thoughts were there, and by the time she was out and in front of the mirror she was red-faced and grinning like an absolute idiot.

It was the idea of it, she thought, more than anything else. The idea that she of all people could want someone that way, could run her hands across her stomach in the shower and shut her eyes and imagine the touch belonged to someone else...

It was an amazing feeling. It made her stomach churn, but there was such a strong sense of relief to it as well.

Bryce had always been a freak, in her father's words, and before she knew what the word meant she knew that it applied to her. There had always been some quality in her, some aloofness or strangeness or something, that kept her separated from most other people. Even when she was old enough to know that her father was a pathetic alcoholic bastard, she couldn't deny that she still felt different from most other people.

So all the daydreaming, the wanting, the way her skin felt in the shower as she thought about someone else touching it...that was all a sign of something more meaningful than lust. It was a sign that though she might be a ridiculously late bloomer in some ways, maybe she actually wasn't as different as she had always believed. If she could want a man that way, maybe she wasn't meant to be alone.

Maybe she wouldn't have to be alone anymore.

She dressed herself feeling like the entire world was outside the door to her suite, waiting for her to reach out a hand and grasp it. Own it. It was perhaps the purest sense of optimism she had ever felt in her life, and she wanted nothing more than to make it last.

 

* * *

 

And it did last. Right up until the moment when the door to her lab slid open in front of her, and she found Tony Stark and Steve Rogers inside, doing their best to devour each other's faces.

The mere presence of other people in her normally silent space took her aback enough that it took a few seconds for her to process what was happening. It wasn't particularly subtle or hard to parse out, her brain simply seemed to make the connections particularly slowly.

Tony was sitting up on her clean stainless steel counter, and Steve stood between his legs pressed up close. Tony's leg was hooked around Steve's thighs, his fingers buried in neat blond hair as their mouths moved together. It looked pretty intense. Voracious. It looked...

Well. It looked pretty beautiful, actually. Bryce only got about a quarter profile on them, since she was frozen in the doorway and unable to move in further, but it was a good angle to catch the vibrant contrast between Tony's tanned skin and dark hair, and Steve's paler golden blond. Steve was broader than Tony, all but engulfing him against that counter with Tony's limbs wrapped around him, inviting it. The only movement was Tony's fingers tightening and loosening against Steve's hair, and the motion of their heads as they moved together. The silence in the lab around them made the wet slide of lips and tongues and the heavy breaths gasped between them seem that much louder.

Aesthetically, they were striking. For an absurd moment of time that was where Bryce's thoughts landed, thinking that they were beautiful together. That they fit.

But even when surprised like that, Bryce was quick to action. In or out, her mind commanded, and without hesitation her feet backed her back out the door. It slid shut with a whisper of air, and the unexpected sight was gone. Blocked by the door with that proud Dr. Banner nameplate on it.

She turned, and she moved down the corridor back to the elevator that would take her upstairs.

And it was fine. It was _fine._

It was fine. It made sense, and good for them.

God knew it wasn't the first time Bryce had read a situation completely wrong. She was good on her feet, good with her work and research, and astonishingly good at making her way out in the world without a dollar or a laptop to her name. But she was bad at people. She always had been.

Steve didn't ask about dating _her_. He asked about dating someone her age, and Tony was just a few years older than Bryce.

Tony didn't say he was interested in her, he said he was interested in _someone._ If he made a lot of eye contact and seemed to watch her reactions as he mentioned all that...it was just Tony being Tony. Maybe he assumed she would know he was talking about Steve. Maybe he was checking for signs of homophobia.

Maybe Bryce was an absolute _idiot._

It was hard not to feel stupid as she rode that silent elevator back to her rooms. She walked through her door and activated the lock behind her, and stood there, trying not to overreact to everything. Her heart was thumping hard in her chest and her breathing was fast and uneven, which felt a little melodramatic to her.

She was just glad she hadn't actually said anything. Not even to Betty. Nobody had to know she was ever so egocentric and naïve as to think that those two remarkable men were...

...in her _lab_ , of all places. For God's sake, why would they even go down there, much less decide to hump on the closest clean surface? Right around the time she got there every morning.

Oh, god. Maybe they realized what she thought. Maybe they picked up on her attraction to one or both of them. Maybe that was Tony's subtle way of staking his claim on Steve, telling her to back off.

She was so stupid. She was absolutely _stupid_ , and she was never going to be able to look at either of them again.

She just...she forgot who she was for a while there, that was all. She forgot that Bryce Banner wasn't allowed normality. She wasn't some strong, beautiful hero. She wasn't Natasha, all strength and grace and power. She wasn't a willowy, confident beauty like Pepper Potts. She was a forty year old woman with toxic blood and too many years of hard life showing on her face.

Bryce had one thing going for her: she was smart. She was _brilliant,_ and that was more than a lot of people could say. She had things to offer the world. But those things were in the shape of theory and experiment and research papers, nothing else.

Nothing else.

She just...she forgot about that for a few strange days. But it was...it was fine. It was her life. And fuck all the stupid, forgetful daydreams about love and touches, she was _proud_ of her alienated life. She went through hell as a child and walked away stronger. She was doused in fatal amounts of radiation and came through the other side roaring and fighting. She had gone on the run, starved, begged, and survived it. She'd fought off men whose idea of help was a few bucks or a meal in exchange for a night in their beds. She walked hundreds of miles, slept exposed in freezing rain, worked the most backbreaking day labor, saved lives in the worst conditions.

She was a survivor, and there was no way something insignificant like a ridiculous one-sided crush on two apparently unavailable men was even going to make her flinch.

She just...she needed an hour behind closed doors. Just a little bit of time to force her traitorous thoughts back into the shape they needed to be in.

And then she would be fine.

 

* * *

 

It took her three weeks of what might be called initiations before the jiu-jitsu teacher in Brazil took her seriously enough to agree to train her. Bryce fell back on lessons learned from travels through Tibet, returning to his school after hours, spending quiet, respectful time patiently waiting for him to acknowledge her as being serious.

But Bryce had plenty of patience. She was a woman and an American who was slowly learning not to mangle Portuguese, she understood that she had to be patient in order to be taken seriously. And it was worth it, both for the actual martial arts training she received and the focus _Professor_ Gracie put on meditation and breathing. She got more use out of the _pranayama_ than the jiu-jitsu.

She had stripped down to a camisole and thrown on a pair of yoga pants and was right in the middle of working through some _kapalabhati_ breathing when the frozen silence of her room was interrupted for the first time since her return.

“ _Doctor Banner, Mr. Stark would like a word with you.”_

There was something incredibly cleansing about the forceful diaphragmatic breathing, and she opened her eyes only after a reluctant moment. She was trying to push aside the whole morning, the whole week before it, and it obviously wasn't working when just hearing JARVIS drolling Tony's name made her cheeks light with unhappy heat.

But she did still work for the man, and she wasn't stupid enough to contemplate giving up her place there and her lab just because she had almost made an ass of herself.

So she sat back against the wall and relaxed her arms. “Alright, JARVIS.”

“ _Hey, doc,”_ came Tony's voice a moment later, sounding unusually pinched. _“Getting a late start this morning?”_

It was a good hour and a half after her trip down to the lab, so she assumed he wasn't pinched because he was still in the middle of...whatever...with Steve.

She cleared her throat. “Taking the day off,” she said, pleased when she sounded perfectly normal. “I can pretend to be sick if I need to.”

“ _Considering the fact that I'd be broke if I paid you for all the overtime you put in, I think we're square.”_ Tony paused. _“In fact, I think it's a great idea. You should get out of here for the day. Go see the city. Take Steve with you.”_

Another blush, damn it. “Is there something you need, Tony?” she asked, tension leaking into her voice.

“ _Just checking up. Look, I'm serious, get out of the Tower for the day. It'll be good for you.”_

The urge to snap that she knew damn well what was good for her came and went, a few deep breaths putting her back into a calmer place. “I'll think about it. Thanks, Tony.”

“ _Yep.”_ He didn't sound satisfied, but after a moment he spoke again, his voice softer. _“See you at dinner?”_

She laughed silently. Maybe in another day or two, when she thought she could make eye contact with either of them without spiraling into self-recrimination.

“Maybe,” she answered, just to end the conversation.

Silence fell, and she looked out at the silent room around her, the dark walls and wood floor under the meditation cushion she was sitting on. A change of scene wasn't a bad idea, but though Bryce had the advantage of being the one Avenger whose face (in normal form) wasn't plastered on lunchboxes and t-shirts, she was still intimidated by the idea of roaming around the city as if she were free to do whatever she wanted.

But the silence was heavy around her. She was getting used to the idea of talking to people, and the two she talked to most were...well, they'd be hard to hold a conversation with for a little while. She thought about calling Betty, but wasn't sure she wanted to know if that glow she'd had the first time was suddenly gone. Betty would ask questions, and Bryce was a horrible liar.

Besides, there was something painful about talking to Betty. Something that reminded her too strongly of the life she used to have and would never get back. She didn't need to wallow in every depressing thing she could think of all at once. It wasn't productive.

Life was about moving forward. Of all the things Bryce learned in her roller coaster of a past, that was one thing that stuck with her. Momentum. She had to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and if that was all she could bring herself to do then it was still a lot.

“ _Doctor Banner, I've been asked to inquire if you're planning to leave the Tower as suggested.”_

She blinked upwards towards JARVIS's voice, brow furrowing. “It's been ten minutes, why does Tony...” She stopped, frowning. “Is he trying to get rid of me?”

“ _Mr. Stark's motivations are clear to Mr. Stark alone most of the time, I'm afraid.”_

She unfolded her crossed legs and got to her feet, stretching. “Tell Mr. Stark that what I do off the clock is none of his business. No...” She sighed, looking around for the jeans she'd been wearing earlier. “Just...fine, tell him I'm leaving.”

She could hide her hair, wear sunglasses. Maybe she wouldn't feel as vulnerable out there in the midst of Manhattan as she thought she might.

Anyway, she had a bank account and a living room with empty bookshelves just waiting to be filled. If she had to give up on the idea of one potential comfort, she could damn well fill the gap with another.

 

* * *

 

She had JARVIS send a list of nearby bookstores to her phone, and after about an hour spent thinking of old favorites to re-purchase and reading up on recently-published journals and physics books, she headed down to the lobby of Stark Tower to get some fresh air and try her best to forget about the awful first half of the day.

She made it three steps into the lobby before the first uniform caught her eye.

Bryce was attuned to military uniforms like nothing else in the world. Any coloring, any nation's armies down to police or militia groups. She could spot a uniform as fast as a starving man could smell food.

She kept moving, since nothing drew attention like a person suddenly halting and changing direction. One secret for hiding in plain sight: don't be conspicuous. Not in appearance, not in body language or movements.

She flicked her sunglasses over her eyes and scanned the lobby as much as she could without turning her head enough to give herself away. There was a cluster of Army uniforms, four men all standing near the security desk locked in casual conversation. They didn't appear to be looking for anyone, but they didn't look like a group of friends on leave who happened to wander into the Tower, either.

There was an Army jeep outside, parked in the spot where Tony's limos usually waited for him. That meant there was a driver, since the moment that engine turned off Tony's people would have it towed, military or not. Five men and a way to get away fast.

She didn't turn, since in the normal motion of people coming and going it might have drawn eyes. Instead she angled her steps to the left and simply headed towards the coffee shop as if that had always been her destination. The closer she got the more she angled her steps, until she was moving past the shop and towards the wall of public elevators behind it.

She pushed the button to go up and waited, calm, not even looking back at the soldiers. She pulled out her phone to give her something to focus on, and debated sending a message up to Tony. But the elevator doors slid open before she could bother. She waited for the collection of Stark visitors and employees to file out before slipping on with a couple of other people.

She got out the first time the elevator stopped, and made a beeline for the private elevators that went all the way to the personal wings of the Tower.

Her heart was beating faster as she went, and if nothing else this was a sign that she was nowhere near ready to start walking around the city as if she were a normal person. Sheer paranoia would outweigh any benefits from a trip out into the fresh air.

“ _A short trip, Doctor?”_

She relaxed as the doors shut and JARVIS's voice grounded her back into safety. “Change of plans.” She pushed the button to go to Tony's personal office. No more avoiding the issue. If one thing could outweigh her mortification over lusting after two men who only wanted each other, it was fear of the military becoming a presence at Stark Towers.

“ _Mr. Stark is in a meeting.”_

“I can wait, JARVIS.”

“ _I really suggest that--”_

“JARVIS.” She let out a shaky breath, worry making her sharp. “It's important.”

JARVIS didn't speak again, and Bryce leaned back against the wall and focused on breathing, slowing her heartbeat down to normal and paying attention only to the in and out, the inflation of her stomach as she breathed.

The elevator doors opened and she stepped out, sending an awkward but polite smile to the woman who was serving as Tony's PA.

“Doctor Banner!” The woman - Sara, Bryce wanted to say, but she wasn't sure – stood up and shot a wide-eyed look back towards Tony's door. “It's nice to see you again.”

Bryce didn't know the woman enough to really pick out stress in her voice, but that look backward was an instant giveaway. She stopped moving, her shoulders squaring and that paranoia sliding right back into place.

“Is something wrong?” she asked stiffly.

“No, no, but Mr. Stark is in a meeting and can't actually be--”

Timing, Bryce knew well, was everything in life. She was a scientist, she knew the absolute value of nanoseconds when talking about experiment and reaction, and as was true for most everything in physics, what was important in microscopic scale was a reflection of what was important in the bigger world.

So when the door to Tony's office opened up, cutting off the secretary in mid-sentence, Bryce knew there was something at work. Fate.

Tony emerged from the office in mid-laugh. His biting, sarcastic kind of laugh, so that didn't tell her much. But when he paused to hold the door open for his visitor and his gaze went to Bryce as if drawn there, there was a lot to tell from the way the laugh cut off and his eyes grew round.

When an Army uniform emerged, coming between Bryce and Tony for a moment, she wasn't entirely surprised.

When she saw the man inside that uniform, all the paranoia and apprehension building up inside her collapsed inward like a dying star, forming the vacuum of a black hole inside her chest.

In her mind came an instant roar, a howl of fury and hatred and old pain. _Don't move_ , that calmer inner voice that had helped her survive the last few years piped up instantly, trying to drown it out. _Don't run. They only follow faster when you run._

She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, and when General Ross spotted her across the lobby of the plush outer office she met his eyes silently.

Ross flashed a smile, wide and pleased, when he realized who she was. And that told her more than everything else.

She braced, her spine stiff, waiting for the blow to land in whatever way it was coming. A darkness stirred in the back of her head, a green-tinged fury that reminded her of its presence. Ross could try to take her by force, but he would be sorely disappointed by the result. Bryce would never unleash the Thing inside of her willingly, but she wouldn't fight it. Not this time.

“Well, well. If it isn't the device herself,” Ross said, gravely voice full of false joviality. He approached, and Bryce saw nothing but his face, the hate-filled eyes that his smile and forced tone couldn't conceal. When he was close enough he lowered his voice without slowing his steps. “Don't you worry, we'll be back for our property soon enough.”

And he kept moving past her, to the elevator.

She stood there, unwilling to turn, as if looking back at him might make him act to force his hand. She heard the elevator door slide open, and closed again a moment later, and in the seconds in between she heard a low, rumbling chuckle that made her hands fist and the Thing in her mind put in a passionate argument for going after him.

After the door shut she focused on Tony, approaching more slowly, hands already raised to placate her. “Let me explain.”

Bryce drew in a breath, in and out, slow and calming and low in the diaphragm. “No.”

Tony hesitated, his wary gaze on her. She wondered if her eyes were green. Maybe not, he probably would have looked more excited.

She turned and went to the elevator and pushed the button to go upstairs. If he said anything else behind her, she didn't listen.

 

* * *

 

SHIELD had given her a rugged black duffel bag to carry her things in when she first left their carrier to stay at the Tower. She found it deflated in the bottom of the closet along with a dozen pairs of new shoes she ignored. 

She found three of the most flexible elastic-waisted skirts she'd been given, and threw in a couple of t-shirts, though none of them were loose enough to survive the Thing and she'd just have to buy more eventually.

“ _Doctor Banner...”_

“ _Nobody_ is allowed in here, JARVIS. I don't want to hear anything else.”

She shoved as many pairs of socks as she could into the bag, having learned hard lessons on the extreme value of socks when roughing it, and ignored the chiming at the door as she moved through her rooms wondering what else she could take. The phone she set aside on the dresser in the bedroom. From the bathroom she grabbed a few toiletries, leaving behind everything but the basics.

Nothing else was any use to her. Computers and televisions and decorations, books she couldn't carry. Luxuries. In a slim wallet she kept a SHIELD-issued ID and bank card along with money, and she methodically removed everything except the cash before tucking it into her pocket.

Travel fast, travel light. No luxuries, no distractions. She had two things to worry about – where to sleep and what to eat. That was it, at least until she was out of New York, across the border, and far enough away that she could be confident no one was following her.

She hefted that bag over her shoulder and smiled, pained, to think that she was starting out with more than she usually ever had out there in the world.

Across the border up to Montreal, a bus to Newfoundland, and then bribed or hidden passage on the first boat going far away from the US. It was a loose plan, but that was how plans had to be on the run.

“ _Doctor Banner, you realize that Mr. Stark designed emergency overrides into--”_

“JARVIS.” She wanted to snap, but looked around the mostly untouched room and realized that she was actually ready. She shifted the duffel bag higher up on her shoulder and drew in a breath, prepared for a fight. “Open the door.”

“--if I have to rewire your circuits and then tear this entire door...” Tony stopped himself in mid-shout and darted into the room as the door opened. He looked around for her, eyes going from her face to the bag on her shoulder in a split second. “No,” he said instantly, moving in.

Only a couple of paces behind him was Steve, looking pale and worried.

“ _No,”_ Tony said again, storming up as if he had any reason to be angry. “This is not how we're handling this.”

Bryce faced them both calmly, her hand a tight fist around the strap of the bag. “' _We_ ' are not handling anything. You handled things your way, now I'm handling them mine.”

“Bryce.” Steve reached Tony's side and stood beside him. A united front against her. “Hear us out. You need to know what was said during that--”

“No, I don't.” Bryce spoke calmly, though Tony's flashing eyes were stirring up prickles of defensiveness in her. “I don't need to know details. Here's what I know: you met with him. You tried to get rid of me so I wouldn't find out. You had no intention of ever telling me about him or his plans or his threats, did you?”

Tony's throat worked, but he didn't bother lying. “No. Just like I haven't told you about the last three times he's tried to meet with me.”

Bryce tensed, drew in a calming breath, and then threw the duffel bag on the floor when it completely failed to work. “You know why I haven't left the Tower since I got here? Because of this! Because I knew he was out there somewhere trying to get his hands on me. He always _will_ be. And you acting like my...what? My guardian? My spokesman? My new _owner?_ I won't have that.”

“How about your employer, or teammate? How about your _friend_? Would you allow that?”

Bryce's lips pressed thin and she glared at Tony. “You don't understand.”

“Then tell us.” Steve spoke up fast, a hand on Tony's shoulder and his calm eyes on Bryce. “This whole time you've never said a word about General Ross or your past. The only things we can possibly know are whatever we've read in files.”

Bryce glared from Steve to Tony, her hands in fists and the roars of the Thing trapped inside of her echoing in her ears. “You heard how he talked to me, didn't you?” she asked finally, her gaze landing on Tony. “Calling me a 'device'? Saying he'd be back for his property?”

Tony nodded once, terse.

“He _owns_ me. The US Army owns me. I'm a creation, a weapon. They have all the paperwork, signed and filed and on record. Legally, officially, I am a _thing_. Even if you didn't talk to Ross like you're my new owner I bet you anything that's how he talked to you. You're in possession of stolen military _equipment_.” She gestured at herself jerkily. “You'll excuse me if I have reason to think that Captain Military Pride and the designer of the Hulkbuster weapons may end up seeing things his way.”

They both straightened up as if stung, and for a moment she regretted the words. But common sense had to win out, and there really wasn't anything incorrect in what she'd said. Steve was the poster-boy for patriotism above all else, and Tony had a history of making lucrative deals with the military. Maybe it was in the past, but it still factored. Especially if Tony was negotiating Ross's bullshit on her behalf without even telling her.

She let out a breath after a moment and met Tony's eyes. “I saw clips from those hearings when the government was trying to get their hands on your suits. I know how hard you'll fight them. But you negotiating for me like I'm just another suit...I'd rather be on the run. I'd rather be starving in a slum in Guatemala. At least then I'm still a person.”

Tony nodded at that, the heat mostly gone from his eyes. “There's one pretty big thing you're missing here, though.”

She frowned, reaching down to grab the duffel she'd dropped. “What's that?”

“I wouldn't die to protect one of my suits.”

Bryce froze halfway up, straightening slowly.

Tony raised an eyebrow, regarding her. “You're right, I let Ross in and let him say his piece. But if he actually tried to take you, he'd have to go through me. Through the both of us.” He glanced over at Steve. “And I don't mean subpoenas and hearings and lawyers. I mean he'd have to kill us before he ever laid hands on you. And if you think I'd take a bullet for one of those hunks of metal in my workshop, you're way off.”

“It doesn't matter what General Ross thinks,” Steve added, his eyes steady on Bryce. “People aren't property. You don't belong to anyone, and if believing that means that I'm at odds with the American military, then so be it. It doesn't matter what he tries, or who he has on his side. We're not letting him take you. No matter what.”

Bryce's throat seemed to close up, and she had to swallow to clear it. “It's easier on all of us if I just go,” she said after a moment. “Ross despises me. His entire career hinges on getting me back and proving that those experiments weren't a waste. He won't stop now that he knows I'm here.”

Tony shrugged, unconcerned. “It's been over a month since we had a decent fight. I'm getting bored.”

“This isn't a joke, Tony.”

“I'm not joking. I'm simply _supremely_ confident. You're right, okay? I should have told you that Ross was sniffing around. He surprised me earlier, gave me about twenty minutes notice before showing up here, but I should've just let you know what was happening. Mea culpa, okay? But that sure as hell wasn't because I think of you as a _thing_ that I need to protect.”

She let out a breath, relaxing despite herself. Her anger was an old and comfortable friend, even before it had a separate green face. Letting it go felt strange, but there wasn't much alternative in the face of Tony's kind-of apology and Steve's earnestness.

“Then why?” she asked finally.

Tony grinned. “I figured it would piss you off if you knew, and you're so cute when you're happy.”

She rolled her eyes, but gave up. “You do it again and I'm leaving.”

“No problem, you want me to overshare, you got it. Besides, I was underestimating how hot anger makes you, so it's not a bad deal.”

“Tony.” Steve sighed, but his mouth quirked up and he and Tony exchanged smiles.

Bryce smiled after a moment. "I hope you don't come to regret this,” she said finally, turning to set the duffel bag on the couch behind her.

“Hey, we can always call Fury if we need reinforcements. Drag Thor's golden ass down here, get Clint up in the rafters. Send Natasha after Ross. Guy wouldn't last an hour.” Tony considered that. “Maybe we should do that any--”

“No,” Steve said. Then, after a pause, “At least not yet. If what he's doing is officially legal, we can't go after him for it. But the moment he crosses a line...”

“Goody.”

Bryce snorted softly, sitting down on the arm of the couch and trying to let the remains of her tightly-clenched tension melt out of her. What kind of line did he have to cross? The bastard had stolen almost eight years of her life already thanks to his obsession.

“Why does he hate you so much?” Steve asked a moment later, maybe hearing her snort or understanding why she sat there so wilted.

She shrugged. “Career embarrassment isn't enough?”

“Is that all there is?”

Bryce looked up, blinking to see that Tony and Steve had both come closer, circling on either side of her like it was a concerted move.

After Ross's sudden appearance back in her life she'd almost forgotten the fiasco from that morning, but having them both there side by side brought it back. It ranked a distant second for shitty things that had happened that day. Still, it made her smile muted as she regarded the two of them.

Tony reached over and grabbing the duffel bag. “Come on, you can tell us all about it while we unpack you and burn this bag so we don't have to go through this again.”

"Tony." She reached for the bag, but Tony tossed it over to Steve, who headed right for the bedroom without missing a beat.

“Come on.” Tony held out a hand for her. He grinned when she looked up at him. “I think we have a few more things to talk about tonight.”  


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I know I promised smut but this chapter was already way too long. First thing next chapter, PROMISE. Smut and then danger. :)

When Bryce reached her bedroom Steve was already tugging clothes out of the duffel bag she'd packed, moving hesitantly as if scared of what he might find in there.

Bryce didn't bother reassuring him that any underwear besides socks were strictly luxury and weren't included in her hurried packing. It was kind of cute to watch him pulling things out so timidly.

“So?” Tony followed her into the bedroom and approached Steve, swatting his hand away from the clothes. “Let me do it, you baby. So why exactly does Ross have such a hard-on for you?”

She made a face at the mental image. “Let's watch the phrasing,” she said, smiling faintly at Tony's answering laugh.

She paused, though, her amusement fading as she thought back years ago, to the time right before her life as she knew it was blasted away from her. It was the time in her life that she was closest to being purely happy. The serum project and everything it entailed was a fascinating challenge for her, and she hadn't felt challenged enough in her life. And, if the work wasn't enough, there was...

“Betty,” she said out loud, sitting down on the bed and leaning back against the headboard, watching two men rummage through her bag as if there was anything in there that might be interesting. “Betty Ross.”

Tony stilled, looking at her with eyebrows hiking upward. “The General's...”

“Daughter.” Bryce smiled. “I met her at Harvard. We were close.”

“Close?” Tony wagged his eyebrows, and it was Steve's turn to swat at his arm.

Bryce couldn't help a bitter smile at that reaction. “She was – _is –_ my closest friend. We were both grad students at the same time, I was working on my third PhD, biophysics, she was going after her doctorate in cellular biology. We had a lot of the same problems, actually: we came from repressive families, neither of us are particularly gregarious, and we were both struggling to be taken seriously in our fields.” Her smile softened. “I think Betty had a harder time than I did. She's gorgeous, which is like the mark of Cain for a woman in the sciences.”

Tony leaned against the edge of the bed, one of Bryce's skirts hanging forgotten between his hands. “This is turning into a Penthouse letter, isn't it?”

“Tony. Seriously.” Steve yanked the skirt from his hands and folded it awkwardly. “Go on, Bryce. What happened?”

Bryce nodded at Tony, wry. “That did.”

Tony lifted a hand to his chest innocently.

“We were inseparable outside of classes and labs, and neither of us had time to waste on dating or hooking up with the same idiots we were fighting against to progress.” She shrugged. “And apparently two women can't be close friends without every male in the area having to fetishize it to give them nice daydreams. It started to be whispered that we were a couple.”

Tony ducked his head, nodding. “Okay, yeah, I'm a pig.”

She huffed out a breath. “One of the few ways you are entirely unremarkable, Tony. But that was the root of the problem. After we finished our PhD work, General Ross's serum project needed a cellular biologist to help develop a compound. He of course hired his brilliant daughter. Then when their nuclear physicists hit a dead end and they needed to outsource the entire gamma side of the project...”

“She recommended her college friend.”

Bryce nodded at Tony. “It took maybe three days after I arrived for the same gossip and innuendo to start flying around, and for the same reasons. The macho idiots around us had to have some excuse for why they were all striking out with us. But this time the General got wind of the rumors, and he believed them. It was already a source of contention between him and Betty, her never showing any interest in men, or bringing home boyfriends. Hell, he wanted her to be married and waddling around with a kid in her belly more than he wanted her to go to Harvard in the first place. Suddenly he thought he knew why she wasn't someone's housewife by then.

“He tried to have me thrown off the project, but I'd more than proven myself by then, and we were close to live testing. The project was running into funding issues as it was, thanks to some senators balking at the expense of recreating Captain America.” She sent Steve a faint smile. “So I wasn't going anywhere.”

Steve sat down at the foot of the bed, leaving her clothes in an awkwardly refolded pile.

Bryce sighed. “Ross isn't what you'd call open-minded. He confronted her about the rumors, said he wouldn't have a lesbian for a daughter and she was to stop associating with me and find herself a boyfriend before he had to find one for her.” She smiled faintly. “Betty told him the truth – that we were both completely straight, but that once the project was done with she never wanted to see him again. She could abide him being a bully and a tyrant her whole life, but she wouldn't have an intolerant bigot for a father, especially when he was ready to disown her over some locker-room innuendo.”

Steve nodded at her. “He blamed you for it all.”

“Of course. Even if he believed her that we were simply close friends – and I don't think he did – then I was still to blame for the rumors, the conversation, her turning against him. He absolutely loathed me for stealing his daughter from him, despite the fact that I really had nothing to do with it. Not to say I wasn't completely on Betty's side for the whole thing.”

She unraveled from the bed and moved around, taking the skirts the two of them had helpfully unpacked for her and heading for the closet.

“I have no idea how much his hatred of me factored into the accident during testing. I can tell you that I had bad vibes about the whole thing, but some of that might have been the General's secrecy about the project. It wasn't hard to parse out later on that the goal that I was working towards wasn't the goal they had in mind. I thought we were after a way to protect soldiers from radiation exposure. The General was trying to develop a weapon.”

She hung the skirts up one by one, listening to the silence behind her. “I didn't volunteer myself as a test subject because I was feeling cocky about the experiment. Any decent scientist knows that you lose something when you involve yourself in your experiments. Some distance, some impartiality. They even had a volunteer lined up, Rick...something, a student at Culver. Nice guy, completely uninformed about what he was getting into.”

Bryce turned, moving slowly back to the bed. There was a strong chance that this was the most she had talked to anyone at one time in years, and self-consciousness made her hesitate as she took the shirts she'd wadded up into the bag and smoothed them out against the bed.

“So? What happened?”

She looked up at Tony's question, flushing when she realized that she actually had an interested audience. Steve and Tony were both watching her, waiting.

She took the shirts with her back to the closet. “I had a feeling something was wrong. Or not _wrong,_ really, but I knew there were things I wasn't being told. I believed in my work, I didn't suspect that anything would go wrong, but I didn't feel comfortable letting this innocent kid get involved in an experiment that I didn't know the full parameters of. And when I suggested letting one of us on the project team test the first wave of the serum out, Ross thought it was just a brilliant idea.”

Silence fell as she hung up the last shirt and toyed with the sleeve absently. Thinking about the past was no fun for her. It was a common exercise – usually out on the road she only had herself and her memories for company – but talking about it, rehashing mistakes that led to her life falling apart, was not easy at all.

Still, Steve was right earlier when he said that her silence about her past gave them no chance to understand where she was coming from. And for some reason she had yet to figure out, they seemed to be genuinely interested in understanding.

“So after the accident, when the irradiator malfunctioned and released enough gamma to kill me but instead turned me into that Thing, imagine how furious it made Ross. Here was a random and accidental set of circumstances that turned the woman he hated into the thing he wanted most – an inhumanly strong, invulnerable killer. The accident and the damage the Thing caused made the project a huge liability. It was shut down, and Ross was left to hunt me down to try to prove to his superiors that he hadn't wasted millions of dollars and years of time. I stole his daughter, destroyed his reputation, and took his giant killing machine with me when I ran.”

She turned back to them, shrugging with a forced smile. “Last week I got in touch with Betty for the first time in years. Suddenly Ross is here hunting me down."

Steve frowned at that. “You don't think she...”

“Betty?” Bryce laughed. “Not a chance. She's talked to her father exactly one time since the accident, and it was right before the Harlem fight when I was back in her life. I think Ross is watching her, though. I think he knew I'd be in touch. I need to warn her that he's monitoring her.” Bryce moved back to the bed to finish unpacking. “I trust Betty. She's the one person in the world that I know I can trust.”

She reached for the pairs of socks still tucked inside the duffel bag, but a hand closed around her arm. She looked over at Steve's wide, clear blue eyes.

“The only person?” he asked quietly.

Bryce flushed. “I'm working on it,” she answered softly, glancing over at Tony to include him in her words. “It's not easy.”

Tony flashed a thin smile. “I guess I didn't help anything today.”

Bryce shrugged. “I understand why you didn't tell me, but I've only had myself to rely on for years now. If I think I'm not being allowed to protect myself...”

Tony nodded. “I never doubted that you could handle him, Bryce. I just didn't think you should have to.”

“Tony came to me days ago about Ross, about his calls,” Steve said. “Any anger about secrecy should be aimed at both of us.”

He was still holding her arm, a loose grip near her wrist. Bryce's fingers twitched at the strangeness of touch, but she didn't pull away.

“I was serious before,” she said simply, to both of them. “If I think I'm being excluded from decisions about my own life, I'll leave. It would be hard, incredibly hard, to walk away from all this. But I've done harder things.”

Steve nodded. “Understood. You have my word that we won't protect you any longer without your full knowledge.”

Tony echoed the nod. “But you need to realize that we didn't do it out of some sense that you were weak and couldn't fight your own battles.” He studied her face, and then his gaze slipped down to her arm. To Steve's fingers around her wrist.

Bryce flushed, even more aware of the touch suddenly. But Steve didn't seem inclined to let her go, and for some reason she couldn't bring herself to pull away.

“I know,” she said finally, trying to make a joke of it. “You just think I'm cute when I'm happy.”

“Which is Tony's way of saying that we care about you and think you deserve a break.”

Her grin faded and she couldn't look over at Steve. She couldn't meet either of their gazes, thinking sudden cringing thoughts about how she would have misinterpreted those words, that touch of his hand, a day ago.

There was a moment, an unsettled silence between them, and then Tony broke it suddenly and forcefully.

“Now that you mention it, we happen to think that you deserve a hell of a lot more than just a break, and--”

“Tony.” Steve spoke sharply. “ _Timing._ Honestly.” His hand slipped from Bryce's arm. She missed it immediately.

Tony frowned at Steve. “What about the timing? She's not traumatized, we fixed things. Right?”

He nudged her other arm after a moment and Bryce looked up, confused. “We're fine,” she answered, wondering what she was talking him into.

“Right.” Tony flashed Steve a meaningful look before turning back to Bryce. “So. I admit this would have been an easier conversation this morning, if you'd just come to the lab the way you were supposed to, but...”

Bryce flushed, pulling away from the both of them to avoid any further potentially confusing touches.

“I have no idea what conversation we're supposedly having right now, but...I'm not sure it would have been helped by watching the two of you make out first.”

And there, at least that was out and done with.

Or not done with, because Steve and Tony instantly exchanged looks, Steve flushing a dark red and Tony just grinning like those words were the whole point.

“So you _did_ show up! Wait, so you just left without saying anything?”

“What was I supposed to say?” she asked, the memory of that morning making her voice sharp. “'Congratulations?' 'Stop contaminating my clean surfaces?'”

“Well, for a start--”

“Tony!” Steve reached across the bed and slapped Tony's arm, fairly hard given Tony's wince in reaction. “Enough helping. I shouldn't have listened to you to begin with.”

Tony gave his best wounded look in response, but grinned a moment later. “You had fun.”

Steve turned away from him, looking up at Bryce. “We went down there this morning to talk to you. I allowed Tony to distract me, which I really need to stop doing.” His cheeks touched with pink. “He seemed to think that if you saw us... _together_ , it would save a lot of conversation. I assumed we would hear you come in.”

Bryce flushed and looked away from them, their glances and familiar smiles making her stomach twist the way it had so fiercely that morning. “So you wanted me to know you two are...whatever you are. Together.”

“I was kinda hoping it might turn you on a little,” Tony answered cheerfully.

“Will you _please_ let me handle this?” Steve glared over at Tony before looking up at Bryce. He got to his feet, moving around the bed and approaching her, looking oddly nervous. “We've only...Tony and me, I mean, we've only been. You know. For a few days now.”

“Yeah, this is why I won't let you handle this.” Tony hiked a leg up on the bed and faced Bryce. “We got together a few days ago. I mean, we've been sniffing around each other since the night of the attack, but it never felt right. Plus I had Pepper to answer to.” He smiled, less cocky and more human. “But even now it doesn't feel completely right. Not for either of us.”

Steve took over then, sending Tony a small smile in thanks. “I admit, I had to get used to the idea of being attracted to a man, especially a man like Tony.”

“Hey!”

“But at the same time,” Steve went on with a faint smile, “and even more strange for me, really, was the idea that I was equally attracted to two people at once.”

Bryce looked from Steve to Tony, suddenly feeling incredibly nervous.

Tony stood up and moved around the bed to join Steve at the foot. “I gotta say, doc, it was even odds for me too, once I got back from Malibu. It could have been Steve I hooked up with, it could just as easily have been you. But by some miracle Steve actually relaxed enough to flirt back, which is further along than you've gotten.”

Bryce swallowed, backing up a step unconsciously. Her cheeks felt unpleasantly hot, her stomach churning with some swell of emotion that could just as easily twist into anger or hurt or...anything else, depending on the next few moments.

“So, what?” she asked, her voice hoarse. “I missed my chance?”

Tony sighed audibly. “Christ, you are so cynical, Bryce. Listen to what we're saying here.”

“We're saying,” Steve took over, gently, “that we both care about you. We're both attracted to you. And us getting together the way we have, it's been nice. But there's something missing.”

“Some _one_ ,” Tony concluded. “We're not right without you, doc.”

She breathed in, slow and deep, feeling her stomach fill and expand and then deflate as she let the breath out. They both watched her, seemingly content to just stand there and witness her quietly fighting off hyperventilation.

It was a little too much to take in at once. Too much for one day, having all her hopes disintegrate in the morning and then suddenly reappear by evening. Not to mention her past coming back to haunt her, giving a meaty center to the sandwich of her day.

Steve broke the silence after a minute. “I thought...we both thought...that there was a chance that you were as interested in us as we are in you. If we're wrong, just...” His eyes were wide, nervous.

Steve Rogers. Nervous.

“...just say so. It won't stop us from caring about you, or stepping between you and Ross.”

“Got that right,” Tony said forcefully. “No one gets to you, doc. No matter what. Just consider this...icing on the cake.”

She held up a hand, lowering it again when she noticed her fingers shaking. “What...” She had to swallow again, to seal the cracks in her voice. “What are you suggesting here?”

Steve blinked, as if he hadn't realized there were different ways to interpret their words.

Luckily Tony answered, sparing her from having to explain. “Well, Cap here's the Great American Prude, and no matter how things ended with Pepper I have to admit that being in an actual relationship was good for me.” Tony reached out, hand resting on Steve's shoulder lightly. “Neither of us is looking for temporary bedmates to spice up our sex life or anything like that. If you're in, you're in. The three of us, for good and bad and all that crap.”

Bryce's gaze went to Tony's hand against Steve's broad arm. She wanted to avert her eyes, but her mind went back to that morning, to how right the two of them looked together, and her cheeks flushed with heat.

Tony smirked, seeing where her eyes were. “I'm thinking we did turn you on this morning, huh?”

Steve heaved an annoyed breath and looked over at Tony disapprovingly.

Before he could speak, though, Bryce forced herself to answer honestly. “You were...it was beautiful.”

Steve's mouth shut and he looked back at her. Tony grinned.

Bryce had the same kind of breathless spine-stiffening feeling she got when first spotting uniforms in the Stark Tower lobby. A nervous, pained sense that things were suddenly, drastically changing and she had to act fast.

There was fear there, but not fear of some external force. She wasn't scared of Tony and Steve. She was scared of herself. She knew how to run from uniforms, how to make an escape no matter who was after her. She knew how to survive with nothing. What she was still coming to terms with was having safety, company, work. The small and the huge luxuries of being Tony's guest.

That was hard enough, but at least it made sense: she worked for him, there was a contract. She helped him. Having a place to sleep and food to eat in exchange made sense. Give and take, it was the basis of every arrangement she made in her travels, every cot and roof given to her in exchange for a day's labor or use of her medical knowledge.

This was something else entirely.

“Doc? You breathing?”

She blinked and pulled her focus from inside her own mind to the two men looking back at her.

Tony's grin was softer, and there was something that looked like understanding in his eyes. “Well, since you haven't laughed in our faces or thrown us out yet I'm guessing we were right that you're interested, at least in one of us.”

It was an opening, and she nervously stuck out a metaphorical toe and braved stepping in. “You were right,” she confirmed, her cheeks still unpleasantly hot.

Tony raised his eyebrows, waiting.

Her mouth twitched up into a crooked smile. “Both of you,” she clarified, and despite their words the admission still made her sheepish. “I thought...” She swallowed, since the thoughts had made her feel so incredibly, uncharacteristically giddy before they smashed her apart that morning. “I talked myself into thinking I had a...” She laughed and it felt tight and ragged. “Like I'd get a choice.”

Tony grinned, but it faded an instant later as he looked at her.

She blinked in surprise and wiped at her face, almost laughing at the sight of wetness gleaming on her fingertips. What an incredibly absurd thing to shed tears for. She hadn't cried that morning when she thought she was back to being alone, a freak. She hadn't cried when Ross showed up, threatening to take away absolutely everything she had now.

Luckily it was just a couple of wayward tears, though they left her feeling ragged and wide-open. She drew in a breath to get herself under control.

A hand wrapped around her wrist, and she looked up into a broad expanse of chest suddenly right in front of her.

Steve's brow was furrowed, his mouth pinched with worry. He reached out with his other hand, a warm, rough thumb swiping at a wet trail of skin under her eye. “I can't tell if this is good or bad,” he said quietly.

“I...” Bryce laughed, faint. “It's just been a really long day.”

He relaxed, and pulled her in. His arms circled her, holding her close against him. Absurdly, it took her a moment to realize it was a hug.

She had to fight down the tension in her back and shoulders, sinking against him bit by bit until her face was buried against his chest and her hands clenched against his shirt. He was tall, broad and solid against her. He smelled clean, like soap and the detergent Tony's laundry service used, and something rich and masculine under that.

It took her a moment to accept his touch enough to let it comfort her, and another minute before she felt solid enough to pull back and stand on her own.

“Sorry,” she said as she stepped back, trying not to be too aware of how his hands trailed her back and paused at her hips before slipping away from her. “I just--”

“What, I don't get one?” Tony appeared at Steve's side – he might have been there the whole time, but Steve was broad enough to block him from view – and sent her a smile, open and warm and free of mockery. He opened his arms, expectant. “I mean, whose idea was all this in the first place?”

Steve chuckled beside her, and Bryce felt grateful for the grin her mouth twitched up into. She couldn't even fake being put out as she stepped in closer to Tony.

He slipped an arm around her waist. “Actually, I have a better idea.” His other hand rose to her chin, tilting her face up, and he cocked an eyebrow in silent question.

Bryce's grin faded in a moment of apprehension, but she drew in a breath and met his eyes, slipping in closer. Tony's eyes were glittering as he leaned in.

It was a surprisingly gentle, easy kiss. Tony's lips brushed against hers lightly, a careful nudge, before he pulled her tighter against him. His hand slipped to the back of her neck as his mouth slid against hers, gentle but firm. As if he understood how unfamiliar this ground was under her feet.

Tony felt very different than Steve. He was only a couple of inches taller than her, and though he was deceptively strong he wasn't nearly as broad as Steve. He was thankfully free of colognes, and whatever soap he used was spicy, dark and earthy and perfect for him.

He pulled back after a minute, without trying to push things too deep. Her eyes opened slowly, and she licked her lips absently only to flush warm when his gaze slipped down to her mouth and focused intently.

“That felt like a yes,” Tony said after a moment, gaze locked on her lips.

"I..." She hesitated, glancing over at Steve.

It was ridiculous, the idea of taking her time to make a choice that she'd made subconsciously days or weeks ago. She hadn't ever thought of the possibility of being with them both at once, but she had thought longingly of being with each of them. There really wasn't a choice to be made.

But Bryce was too worn and too burned by the last few years to simply accept anything offered to her. It had taken her days to feel her way into the Tower itself, and that was a much less personally affecting offer than this one was.

“Want to sleep on it?” Steve asked after a moment, a faint smile on his face.

She let out a breath. “Yeah. That would...I just need...” She shook her head.

“Hey, no problem.” Tony stepped back, his hand slipping from her. “We figured it would be a lot to take in. Let's face it, either one of us is a catch. Both of us together? Incidentally, my original plan was to have you overcome with lust in the lab and just pull you right in to the middle of a sexy little sandwich. Would that have worked? Steve seemed to think--”

“You need to keep listening to Steve,” Bryce cut him off, her voice wry. “I can't promise the Thing wouldn't have made an appearance if you tried that.”

“Your Thing or our--” Tony jerked away right before Steve aimed a swat at his arm, and laughed at the look on Steve's face. “Okay, okay. Sorry, I don't do so well with tension, alright?”

“We're all aware of that, thanks,” Steve answered, but his smile was fond as he turned back to Bryce. “Take your time. Tomorrow we should all sit down and work out how to handle Ross. You need to hear the 'deal' he's been offering Tony, and we need to figure out what might be behind it. If I need to call Fury and ask for Agents Barton and Romanoff to stay available, I will.”

Bryce drew in a breath, recovering a little in the face of the other problem she'd run into that day. She nodded seriously. “I want to hear everything. If he's going to bring some kind of legal trouble on you, we might have to work out how to handle--”

“Bryce.” Steve sent her much the same kind of frustrated look he always aimed at Tony. “You're not going anywhere, no matter what kind of trouble he plans to bring. No matter what, okay?” He met her eyes for a moment.

She nodded, understanding that he meant to include this whole thing with the two of them, and the possibility that she might turn them down. She couldn't help but think that Steve and Tony were both being a little naïve about exactly what Ross was capable of, but then she knew herself: before their lives were anything like ruined by that bastard she would find a way to get away, even if she had to lie to their faces and sneak out during a coffee break one day.

They might hate her for it if things came to that, but they would hate her with their lives and jobs and fortune and reputations to comfort them.

“We'll talk in the morning,” she agreed, meeting Steve's gaze before looking over at Tony. “And...” she laughed. “I feel like I should thank you, but something tells me that would be inappropriate.”

“Just say goodnight,” Tony suggested with a grin. “At least I assume you're not planning to join us for dinner?”

She returned the grin. “And give you a chance to cloud my head? Nope, I'll take care of myself tonight, thanks.”

His eyebrow rose, his smile sharpening. “Really?”

She laughed, flushing, and stepped away from the two of them, turning back to the still unpacked remains of her bag. “Jesus, just go.”

 

* * *

 

 

She was putting away the toothbrush and soap she had grabbed from the bathroom when she got caught by the inescapable image of her own reflection in the oversized mirrors. 

For a while she was stuck there, her focus critical as she took in her disheveled dark curls and the faint lines around her mouth. The gray in her hair, the shadows under her eyes that never seemed to face no matter how much rest she got.

Maybe it was hard to grasp their offer because she simply didn't understand what they were getting from it. She understood the give and take of working for a night's lodging, or helping Tony with his projects in exchange for a salary. But something like this? An actual relationship?

She had never understood what a person was supposed to bring in to something like that. Companionship, that she could provide. At least she enjoyed spending time with Tony and Steve, working or watching movies or catching up on the news, teaching Steve some bit of tech or modern social mores that he was uncertain about. Arguing theory with Tony, not missing the light of surprise in his eyes when she would prove one of his ideas wrong. He wasn't used to talking to people who could keep up and at times out-argue him, and she understood that being around her offered him some relief that way.

But friends were just as giving with their time, right? They already got her for hours a day as it was. There wasn't companionship to be gained by changing the terms of their relationship with her.

The obvious answer seemed to be that they were attracted to her. As she regarded her reflection in the mirror it was hard to grasp that things were that simple.

She wasn't unattractive, she assumed. At least she drew plenty of eyes and attention almost anywhere she had ever been. But some of that was because she was a stranger, an American, a single woman alone. She had certainly never made a point of trying to appear attractive or enticing, not while she was traveling. She could count on one hand the number of times she tried before the accident.

Anyway, these weren't any two men. This was Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. Tony, the billionaire genius who could have any given supermodel on his arm whenever he wanted. And Steve – almost half her age physically, strong and charming and the very symbol of heroics across the country. God knew he could have his choice of women or men, young and pure and as otherworldly as he was.

So if it was more than companionship or aesthetic interest, what else was there?

Trust, her mind supplied instantly, and that made sense. It would be vital for her in a relationship, she didn't see either of them feeling any different. There were very few people that she could invite into her life, who would both know and accept everything that she was and did. All the baggage from having the Thing inside of her head, the association with the Avengers and, more distantly, with SHIELD.

It also diminished the guilt, she thought, to be with someone who was already caught up in this strange world they were in. To not have to complicate an otherwise normal person's life with the danger and secrecy. There was convenience there.

So, okay. Logically it made a kind of sense.

She regarded her reflection again, trying to focus on the bigger picture and not the flaws that she noticed so readily now that she was around mirrors regularly.

She really had held up well for her age, given the life she led. Her hands were a bit more calloused than the average woman's, and her eyes looked – to her, at least – like she'd lived a hundred years more than she really had.

Betty Ross was beautiful, tall and graceful, feminine, stunning. Bryce was short, eyes too big and curls too hectic, and though the last few years had actually carved her too thin, she used to be on the curvy side. Cute, she was called by interested suitors. Adorable.

Maybe that was enough. After all, she was smarter than about 99% of the population, she had moments of humor and charm. She was there, in the Tower, in the Avengers, in the madness, already. And the way she was attracted to Tony and Steve...she could believe, after some mental gymnastics, that despite her age and 'cuteness' they might feel the same for her.

But as she left the bathroom with that decision made, she didn't find herself any more comfortable with the idea than she had been.

It should have been a no-brainer. After all, as she had already acknowledged, she had in her thoughts already paired herself with them both one on one. But when she imagined going to them in the morning and smiling and saying yes, it made her stomach twist uncomfortably.

And Bryce was not a woman who ignored her instincts. No matter what they made her give up.

 

* * *

 

It wasn't until she was in her second hour of lying in bed staring at the darkness that evening that she realized.

Her fear wasn't instinct warning her to stay back. It was the same fear that made her wear borrowed, ill-fitting clothes three days in a row when she first got to the Tower and was too nervous to open the closet Tony had filled for her. It wasn't fear of making a mistake, it was fear of getting something that she wanted.

She wasn't worried about trying this and somehow screwing it up. She was worried about stepping in line with the two of them and realizing that she actually belonged there.

It was easy to run from a rental apartment in Virginia when she first had her accident. It was easy to run from Betty after New York, knowing that Betty had an entire life to protect and Bryce was only making it worse.

But what if the next time she had to run she couldn't do it? What if she came to care about Tony and Steve so much that she couldn't leave without ripping herself apart and leaving too much with them? The lab she could leave. The wardrobe, the computers, the gourmet meals and laundry service and JARVIS, the tea in the evening in front of a gorgeous fireplace in her rooms. It was nice, all of it, breathtakingly nice. But she could leave that.

Love was different.

Tony said he would take a bullet for her. Steve said they would stand between her and danger no matter what. Bryce had no doubt that she would gladly unleash the Thing if either of them were in a hint of trouble.

It didn't seem like a far slide from that into something so necessary that she couldn't walk away from it.

It was _terrifying_ , the idea of trying this and finding it to be perfect for her. Life was so fucking ephemeral. She had said goodbye to every person she had ever known, lost everything she ever had. Nothing was permanent. Nothing was certain.

How could she bring something into her life that she might forget how to live without?

Then again, how could she refuse something that she wanted so badly just because it might not last forever?

Bryce was...not a cynic, despite what Tony thought, just pragmatic. Losing everything a few times over would do that to a person. She knew perfectly well that she would never meet a person who was guaranteed never to leave her. She would never have anything that she could trust to be permanent. Even the Thing, the creature fused into her blood, she hoped to be rid of one day.

So if her big fear was impermanence...then her decision was pretty clear. And if her stomach churned and her nerves screamed, that was a pretty mild side effect in comparison to what she'd be getting.

And with that thought, the darkness and silence around her in bed felt suddenly heavy and frozen. She wasn't close to sleep anyway.

Bryce climbed out of bed. She put on the yoga pants she'd left out that morning, and grabbed a t-shirt from the closet.

It felt strange to walk through the corridors of Stark Towers barefoot in her workout clothes, but even that strangeness felt right somehow. Like she was really settling in, finally making herself entirely at home in the...well, the huge industrial tower in the middle of Manhattan.

She hesitated as the elevator doors shut her inside. “JARVIS, where is Tony?”

“ _Mr. Stark is in his room with Captain Rogers.”_

She let out a breath, hoping she wouldn't be interrupting anything.

The door into Tony's private rooms slid open after the first chime, and she peaked in to the darkness of a silent living room.

Tony, wearing only drooping boxer shorts, appeared in a back doorway. The arc reactor glowing in his chest painted the room in a wash of blue light. “Bryce?” he asked, voice rough.

Sleeping. Bryce tried to feel apologetic but she moved in, feeling overwhelmed and excited and she was dangling over a precipice and ready to shut her eyes and take the next step.

Tony reached her halfway, looking wide awake by the time she reached him.

Bryce drew in a breath. “I can't sleep,” she said simply.

Tony studied her for a moment, and then he smiled. Maybe it was the fog of sleep affecting him, but that smile was shockingly broad and wide and remarkably uncomplicated. He turned and gestured towards the door behind him.

“Come on.”

It was an obscenely large bedroom, unsurprisingly. Steve was on his back on the side of a bed that looked too big to not be custom-made. He was snoring quietly, undisturbed by noise or the return of the nightlight shining from Tony's chest.

“When he feels safe he sleeps like he's back in the ice,” Tony mentioned quietly from behind her, his hand warm and solid on the small of her back. “Climb on in, you won't wake him.”

Bryce obeyed, powering through her uncertainty and sliding into the oversized bed. She settled down on her back a few inches from Steve, but Tony wasn't having that. He dropped into the bed beside her and nudged her even closer to Steve.

She lay there as he tugged the covers up over them, on her back, looking up into darkness muted by a faint blue glow as the covers blocked out most of the reactor's glow.

“Never tell anyone this,” Tony murmured as he settled in, “but I'm kind of a sucker for closeness. C'mere.”

She looked over uncertainly, rolling on her side to face him. His arm slid under her neck and wrapped around her back, and she found herself laying against his side, head on his chest as Steve snored against her back.

She wanted to thank him for letting her in without a fuss, but in the warmth of that huge bed, against the strangeness of bare skin, being held as she was, she didn't manage much more than a murmur against his skin as the sleep that avoided her downstairs ambushed her and dragged her down into blackness. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sex. Next chapter comes the danger.

It should have been unimaginably strange to wake up in a bed with someone else in it: Bryce woke up completely surrounded.

She could feel the press of solid flesh against the front of her body, and even before she opened her eyes she knew it was Steve. She must have turned around and rolled into him during the night. Behind her, against her, plastered to her back, that had to be Tony. He was spooned up behind her, his arm limp over her side.

In the back of her mind she wondered if JARVIS lowered the temperature in the room at night. It seemed like the only possible way she wasn't sweltering trapped between the two men. But mostly she tried not to bog herself down too soon with a lot of pesky thinking.

After all, it really was strange waking up that way. Strange, and warm, and comfortable.

Bryce kept her eyes shut, breathed in and out regularly, and for a while she let herself simply enjoy things. She listened to them breathing on either side of her, and she felt the slight rise and fall of Steve's side against her arm. She shifted minutely, enough to note where the warmth of Tony's flesh against her back became the harder warmth of skin-heated metal and glass and circuitry. If the arc reactor gave off a hum she couldn't hear it.

She had mentioned the day before, blushing and awkward, that they had looked beautiful to her when they were kissing down in the lab. It was true, and it was disconcerting. They were a contrast that fit together, light and dark, serious and smirking. They were two opposite halves that fit together, and it hardly seemed like there was room for a third. They certainly didn't seem to be lacking anything when it was just the two of them.

But laying there between them made her apprehensions melt back. People weren't as simple as yin and yang, after all, there were no solid edges to any of them. Nothing that said that when they joined together there wasn't room for someone else as well.

After a while she felt the bed shift under her, dipping on Steve's side, and heard his breathing change and become less smooth and even.

Bryce kept her eyes shut, postponing that vulnerable moment of having to acknowledge that she was awake.

Steve shifted to the side, and there was an audible intake of breath from him. Surprise, maybe: she'd forgotten that he was asleep when she joined them the night before.

It was a struggle not to move or alter her breathing when warm, calloused fingertips suddenly appeared against her temple, brushing at her no-doubt wild curls.

“When did this happen?” Steve asked, his voice hushed.

She hadn't felt Tony stir, but his sleep-roughened voice answered against her hair. “Pretty soon after you passed out.” He shifted then, adjusting but not pulling back. The arm he had draped around her pulled in close, hand flat and gentle against her stomach.

“Wow,” Steve said, sounding like he was smiling. “I thought...” His fingers slipped feather-light down her cheek. “I was worried,” he said finally.

Tony let out a soft laugh. “I never worry. But...yeah.”

Bryce couldn't handle it, the idea that she was there, that they wanted her there, that they felt _lucky_ that she was there. She shifted, blinking her eyes open slowly to cut off their hushed conversation.

Steve's hand drew back, but Tony's arm tightened around her.

She found herself looking up at Steve, who was on his side with his arm folded under his head as he watched her. She smiled, small and sleepy, though it was a struggle not to face-plant into the pillow and hide away from them both.

“Morning,” Steve said through his wide, answering smile. “I'm glad you're here.”

She slipped her hand over Tony's where it lay against her stomach, settling back against him experimentally. “I might've overestimated how hard a decision it was,” she answered quietly.

Steve chuckled. He reached out, but hesitated. “Can I...?”

She swallowed and shut her eyes for a moment when his hand curled around her jaw.

“Go on, Cap,” Tony said suddenly, sounding amused. “She owes you one from yesterday.”

Bryce smiled at that, and opened her eyes to nod her permission to Steve.

He searched her face, holding his breath, then leaned in and pressed his mouth to hers, soft and sweet. “That okay?” he asked instantly as he drew back.

She laughed softly, reaching out and tracing a fingertip over his lips. “I'm here, Steve. I'm in. I know I kind of...fell apart a little yesterday, but I'm here now. I won't run, and I won't break.”

Steve flushed but chuckled. “That was you falling apart?” he asked, wry. “I think my own reaction to just Tony had you beat. By a lot.”

Tony hummed agreement behind her. “Gay panic. You should've seen it, he kept twitching. Life's so much easier if you just sleep with whoever you want and ignore the labels.”

She smiled. Tony had always seemed to her like a man who was equal-opportunity with bedmates. Anyone pretty and interesting enough, regardless of gender. She wasn't surprised to find she was right. She wasn't surprised at the idea that this whole thing was far outside Steve's range of experience either. At least they had that in common, even if Bryce was spared a sexual identity crises.

She cleared her throat to smooth out the remains of sleep from her voice. “Still, I'm serious.” Her hand slid from his jaw down to his arm, fingers tracing down the smooth line of rested muscle, marveling at the basic luxury of being allowed to touch.

She watched her own fingers tracing the softened curve of a bicep, then dragged her gaze back to his face.

The heat in Steve's eyes took her breath from her, and her voice went rough and uneven again. “I'm here. I want...”

“You'll get it. Whatever you want.” Tony's thumb stroked back and forth against her stomach lightly, and he slipped down to bury his face against her hair, to brush his lips against the back of her neck.

Bryce shivered, tilting her head down to encourage that warm slide of his mouth against her skin.

Tony's hand slipped down under her thin shirt, and her breath caught at the rough graze of his fingers against her skin. “Is there anything we need to know?” he asked against her neck. “About you and this?”

She licked her lips when she realized what he meant, fighting against the pleasant warmth threatening to fog her brain. “Don't make me bleed,” she murmured in response. “Blood is the only part of me that's toxic. The gamma won't...” She trailed off as Tony's mouth settled behind her ear, causing her skin to prickle deliciously. “Um...won't let me get sick. Or pregnant,” she added softly.

Tony's mouth slowed, maybe hearing something in her voice, but when he spoke it was light. “Hallelujah, no condoms required. What about your big green friend? File said something about heart rate...?”

“Correlation, not causation, it turns out.” Bryce looked up at Steve, relaxing at the heat of his gaze, the way the talk about her wretched irradiated body didn't seem to have any impact on his interest.

Steve slid down and in, kissing her lightly before his mouth moved down to trail slow kisses down her jaw and throat.

Bryce's fingers caught in his hair, her breathing ragged. “It's more...more biochemical than heart rate. Norepinephrine, adrenaline, it activates the gamma...I think. I've never...”

Tony's hand slipped higher up her stomach until his thumb was brushing against the underside of her breast.

She swallowed, feeling the warmth spreading through her. “Never been able to test it properly,” she finished on an exhaled breath.

Tony chuckled against her neck. “Need me to build the Hulk a playroom alongside the lab? Just give the word, you can test all you want.” When she tilted her head to look back at him he leaned in, planting an awkwardly-angled kiss against the corner of her mouth. “I propose test number one right now.”

“Oh?” She shifted back against him, breath catching as the unmistakable hardness of a growing erection brushed against her ass. Bryce's teeth dug into her lip as she arched back more deliberately, pleased at the groan Tony was unable to stifle.

“Oh yeah,” Tony breathed out, hand sliding down to her hip, then further down the line of her outer thigh. “I propose extended exposure to dopamine, to lower cortisol levels and suppress the adrenal response.”

She chuckled softly. “So we reduce the production of adrenocorticotropic hormone...with maybe a nice oxytocin finish at the end?”

“Really?” Steve pulled back with an annoyed breath, peering at them both. “This is how you talk right now?”

Bryce laughed, sudden and uncontrollable. The heat pooling low in her gut, centering between her legs, made her feel wild and a little giddy.

“What do you want to talk about?” Tony asked behind her in his best smirking tone. “We could talk about you for a while, Cap.”

Bryce hummed her agreement, sliding a hand across the firm plane of his stomach and up, tracing the lines and ridges of muscle along his abs, trailing the backs of her fingers across a pale nipple to see his reaction.

Steve flushed, eyes darkening, and the annoyance was gone instantly.

“Christ, look at him,” Tony said in Bryce's ear. “Like something someone would have carved out of marble five hundred years ago.”

She nodded her agreement, thumb moving back and forth across his nipple just to watch his cheeks fill with color and his eyelids droop heavily.

Steve caught himself after a minute, though, his eyes pushing open again and his hand catching her wrist.

“This morning isn't about me,” he said, looking past Bryce at Tony as if to get his agreement.

“Mm, I like the way you think, Cap.” Tony's mouth suddenly dove back in against Bryce's throat, his hand tracing back up her thigh. “Christ, next time don't wear so much,” he murmured as his fingers trailed across the waist of those thin yoga pants.

Steve's mouth was against hers before she could respond, and Bryce leaned into the kiss hungrily. He let go of her wrist and ran his fingers down her side and back up, before finally sliding his hand around to curve over her breast. He drew back from her mouth for a moment, breathing raggedly, looking down at her breast filling his hand.

Bryce slid her fingers back through his hair, a soft sound escaping her throat as Tony's wandering hand drifted down her leg and back up the inside of her thigh. Steve's thumb stroked over her nipple, making her shiver as it hardened under his touch.

Tony's erection pushed against her ass as he pressed restless kisses down her throat. His fingers finished their slow trail up her thigh and pressed up against her, cupping her mound through her pants.

Bryce gasped, arching into the touch, and before she could begin to recover Steve was bending over her, mouthing her breast through the t-shirt. She couldn't do anything but shiver and pant for air as Tony's fingers rubbed against her and Steve's tongue lapped across her nipple.

Tony spoke in her ear, voice low and unsteady. “I want to taste you, Bryce. Can I?”

She moaned softly, arching back against his erection. She had no idea how much this sudden heat inside of her was self-consciousness and how much was just pure need. She did know that one of those two reactions was going to be completely ignored.

He took that incoherent response as a yes, thankfully, and suddenly his fingers slipped away from her and he pulled away from her, sitting up and yanking the covers down from over them.

“First things first. Let's get these clothes off. Cap, you mind?”

Steve's mouth left her, leaving cool dampness on her shirt that made her shiver. He met her eyes, his own glittering and heated. “Not at all,” he answered, the words polite but the tone heavy and loaded. He nudged her onto her back and reached for the hem of her shirt, tugging it upward.

Bryce lifted up enough to help, flushing as Steve tossed the shirt over his shoulder without looking away from her. First meeting her eyes and then wandering downward, gaze so heavy that she could almost feel it stroking down her chest, over her breasts and across her stomach. She reached for him and he came more than willingly, kissing her slow and deep as his hand explored, firm and warm against her skin. She gasped against his lips as he stroked her nipples to hardness, brushed his knuckles along the underside of her breasts.

Tony appeared at her side, nudging Steve out of the way with an impatient hand before looping his fingers in the waistband of her workout pants. “Lift up for me, sweetheart,” he said, and if he tried to meet her gaze his eyes didn't make it past Steve's fingers on her breast.

She pushed her hips off the bed long enough for Tony to peel those pants down past her knees and tug them off, leaving her naked and too overheated to feel bashful about it. She was aware of Tony's hand trailing up her leg as he crawled back on the bed, but Steve was kissing the life out of her and she couldn't focus on any one thing.

“God damn it, Steve, you are too big, you're blocking my view.” Tony nudged at Steve's arm impatiently.

Steve drew back, finally, his lips damp and red and his eyes swirling dark as he looked over. “I'm busy here,” he said, his voice low enough to be a threat.

And God, that dangerous note in his voice, though she knew it was harmless, made Bryce ache to pull him back down and kiss him until they were both faint from lack of oxygen.

Tony just rolled his eyes. “We can both be busy if you'll move your gorgeous muscled ass over.”

Steve softened at that, though the heat in his eyes didn't face, just redirected. He reached out and gripped the back of Tony's head, pulling him in and kissing him hard.

Caught in the middle, Bryce was hypnotized. She'd been right the day before – they were absolutely beautiful together. Strong and passionate, light and dark, struggling for dominance in the way that they always did.

She didn't contribute to that part of them. She wasn't the controlling type, she had no interest in being the voice of authority at home or in the middle of danger. Her role there wasn't to be a third part of this competition they had, she was starting to see. Her role was something different. Something complimentary. Hopefully something that they needed as badly as they needed to constantly best each other.

If the kiss was meant to be a battle, it seemed that Tony came out on top this time. They broke apart with matching gasps and turned to her quickly enough that she knew she wasn't forgotten.

“What did you have in mind?” Steve asked, eyes hungry on her.

Tony thought about it for a moment, considering them both. “You, up against the headboard,” he said, slapping Steve's ass sharply.

Steve hissed in a breath, glaring, but he obeyed. Dressed only in boxer shorts that did nothing to hide an intimidatingly large erection, he moved surprisingly gracefully, shifting pillows up to cushion him as he sat back against the headboard.

"Now...” Tony's eyes went to Bryce. He reached for her arm and tugged her up, meeting her halfway and kissing her, slow and lewd. His tongue was as nimble as those long fingers of his, and by the time he pulled away Bryce's head was spinning and her breathing was ragged.

Tony grinned, pleased at her reaction. “You get the best seat in the house.”

She glanced back at Steve sitting there on his own, and smiled.

Tony ended up guiding her onto Steve's lap at an angle, so that her head was resting near his right shoulder but she was perched mostly on his left thigh. The thick, hard length of Steve's cock was rubbing against her ass, making him groan and wrap his arm around her to hold her there. If she leaned against him and tilted her head up, he could kiss her. Angled and uncomfortable kisses, but it worked.

Tony sat back once they were settled together and sharing awkward kisses, looking pleased with himself. “Man, to be a Nikon right now. You two...”

Bryce was apparently still capable of blushing, but she didn't avert her eyes. She watched Tony, wondering what he had planned.

He patted her knee. “Open up, sweetheart.”

She felt a thrill of heat move down her spine as she spread her legs apart, giving him space to crawl up between them. “Sweetheart,” she repeated. “Is that going to become a thing?”

“You don't like it?” Tony sat on his knees between her legs, leaning in and kissing Steve, slow and much calmer than their last kiss. He pulled away after a minute to bury his face against her throat, mouthing along her neck.

“Don't know yet.” She shut her eyes and tilted her head to give him room. The hair of his goatee and the rasp of his stubbled jaw against her skin made her fight back a breathless laugh.

“I could just stick with 'doc',” he murmured against her skin between the faint smacks of wet kisses along her throat. “But I think it sends the wrong message.”

She reached up and carded her fingers through his hair. “What, that you only like me for my brain?”

He drew back at that, for a moment looking entirely serious. “Actually, yeah. Fails to take into account my huge appreciation for just how fucking beautiful you are.”

Bryce flushed dark, and it took every last ounce of willpower she had not to look away and hide her face like some child. Any other time she might have argued, just reflexively, that she had a lifetime of experience proving that she was not quite up to 'beautiful'. But she lay there against Steve's chest, his arm around her, with Tony's kisses still whispering against her skin, and she didn't consider the idea of arguing.

She wondered if the way she felt at that moment was how Betty felt all the time. She wondered if that was what beautiful felt like.

Pushing the thought away for the moment, she reached out and stroked the line of Tony's jaw. “You're not so bad yourself,” she said simply.

Tony grinned at that. “Yeah, I do okay, huh?” He leaned in and kissed her, quick but firm as if he simply couldn't control the urge, and then let his mouth wander down her throat again, over her collarbone. His talented, calloused fingers stroked down to her breast, and his mouth moved as if to follow.

Steve reached around her suddenly and slapped him on the head lightly. “Mine,” he said, hands sliding around her and filling with her breasts. His thumbs worked over her already sensitive nipples and she sighed, unsteady, leaning her head back against him.

Tony sighed as if put out, but murmured something that sounded suspiciously like 'later' before he shifted down along the mattress and kissed his way up her thigh instead. He nudged her knees further apart and skimmed the pads of his fingers up her other leg, humming contentedly as he felt the wetness high up her thigh.

“Fuck, you're hot for this, aren't you, beautiful?” Tony sounded pleased, as if she'd somehow been too subtle in her desire to be right where she was. He let his fingertips trail up further, tracing along her pussy and groaning against her thigh. “She's so wet for us, Steve, Christ.”

Steve let out a ragged breath in her ear, hands still busy stroking her chest. Bryce let out a slow breath, drawing her knees up and spreading wider for him, not letting herself think too much about it.

“Want to check for yourself?” Tony barely glanced up at Steve. “Mm, busy, huh? Well, allow me.” He lifted his hand, wetness glittering on his fingertips, and held them to Steve's mouth. “You can have first taste.

Steve was red-cheeked, maybe pushing against that comfort zone of his, but when he opened his mouth it was to take Tony's fingers in and suck gently at the offering.

Bryce watched, breathless, catching flashes of his tongue sliding between Tony's fingers, far more turned on by that sight than she ever would have thought she would be. Steve made a low, hungry sound around those fingers.

Tony pulled his hand back after a moment, his own breathing gone ragged, and he buried his face against Bryce's thigh, tongue trailing upward. Finally, settling in on his stomach against the mattress, he hooked an arm around her thigh and sank in against her.

Bryce arched, a sharp noise escaping her uncontrollably as his tongue traced along her pussy, dipping between the folds of her labia and wandering up to flicker against her clit. Pleasure streaked up her spine, vivid and electric, and her head thumped back against Steve's chest helplessly.

Tony made happy, hungry noises against her, his tongue as skillful as his hands as it swooped and darted and lapped at her pussy. Never still or in one place long enough to get a rhythm going, frustrating and teasing, but Bryce was lost to the sensations all the same.

She arched back against Steve, realizing that she was grinding back into his erection and thinking that maybe Tony did that deliberately. She could feel wetness seeping from her, coaxed by Tony's tongue and then eagerly lapped up. By the time she heard herself making sharp, crackling sounds helplessly, he seemed to decide that she'd had enough teasing. His lips closed around her clit, his tongue circling and flickering in a quick and expert rhythm, merciless no matter how she arched and cried out.

The first orgasm shook her, curling her toes against the sheets and making her hand clench around Steve's arm hard. She tried to catch her breath but Tony didn't let up for an instant, tongue still lashing against her clit, fast and relentless.

“Tony,” she heard herself gasp out, her voice strained and high. “Tony...oh god, please. More. Don't stop, don't...” And then a second orgasm slammed over her, sudden and intense, twisting her words into a high moan.

By the time she came back to herself enough to pay attention, Tony had drawn back and was watching her with a fierce intensity she'd only ever seen on him before in his workshop, coming up with some breakthrough or another.

“Jesus,” he whispered, sounding more reverent than he probably ever had before saying that name. “Steve, she's...”

“I know,” came Steve's own thick reply, and when Bryce tilted her head back heavily he was looking as fervent and intent as Tony did. He leaned in to capture her mouth, desperation in the kiss.

Bryce tore away from the kiss when Tony's mouth settled against her again. “Tony!” She shuddered as his tongue circled lightly around her clit and then explored downward. “Wait, god. Let me...”

Tony pulled back, licking his lips and smiling hazily. “Sorry, beautiful, if Steve's going to fit inside here without drawing blood I'm going to have to stretch you good first.”

“Oh, man.” Steve groaned, low and deep, and his hands clenched around her.

Bryce couldn't deny the flash of heat the idea sent through her, and though she felt oversensitive and ragged she didn't protest again.

Tony's mouth worked at her slowly, carefully now. He paused to suck his index finger into his mouth, and was gentle as he pushed it inside of her.

Bryce held her breath as his finger slid in, adjusting to the intrusion slowly and feeling as if from a distance as this first hint of being filled made her body ache with wanting. He pushed that finger in and out, slow and careful, before adding a second.

Steve nuzzled against her cheek, bending lower to mouth at the nape of her neck. Bryce leaned back to give him room, her eyes shutting as she rolled her hips unconsciously in time with Tony's invading fingers. She didn't open her eyes when Tony spoke, though his words seemed to slide against her like silk on skin.

“She feels so good, Steve. So hot and wet, and so tight, Christ. She's gonna feel incredible around your cock. You're gonna fill her up so fucking full...”

Bryce whimpered, clutching at Steve's arm as she pushed back against Tony's hand. Steve didn't seem to be doing much better, his hands frozen against her, his body tense and his breathing hard.

By the time he added a third finger she was driving against him, impaling herself on his fingers and whining with need. Tony buried his head between her legs again and worked his lips and tongue mercilessly against her until she clenched her teeth around a moan and shook in another orgasm, less intense but drawn out and just as consuming. She shuddered with it, hand unclenching from Steve's arm to fall limp to her side, head lolling back against his shoulder as she panted for air.

Tony's mouth left her pussy, and his fingers slid free from her. He pushed up onto his knees, watching her, bringing soaking wet fingers to his mouth absently and sucking the taste of her from them one by one. He seemed oddly still, like he had to regroup and collect himself though she was the only one who had come so far.

Bryce shivered, suddenly aware of sweat on her skin as it cooled in the air enough to prickle. She wanted to curl up and pass out, but Tony seemed to be calling the shots and, Jesus, she wanted to feel Steve inside of her, hitting her deep.

“Might need a minute here,” she said finally, a lust-thickened mumble.

“Don't worry.” Steve shifted suddenly, sliding her easily from his lap and laying her down against the pillow. “It's his turn.”

Tony flashed a grin, though it still looked a little shaken. “ _Moi?_ ”

Steve nodded, reaching out and pushing Tony's chest until he was sitting back on the mattress. “You've been so good, you deserve a treat.”

Bryce wanted to shut her eyes and power through one of those two-minute naps that became her specialty in gran school, but the moment Steve slipped down between Tony's legs and reached for his boxers, her eyes were wide open and sleep was a distant memory.

She licked her lips absently when Steve pushed the waistband of his boxers down and pulled his cock free. Tony's cock was...Bryce was no expert on sizes, but she'd say a little longer than average, with a thick head. She'd never been particularly fascinated by men's penises before, but after he made her feel so incredible she found herself eager to learn him. The taste of him, and the feel, and what he liked.

Steve might have been relatively new to being with a man, but his expression was clouded with lust as he bent low and took Tony in his mouth. His hand wrapped around the length of him, and his mouth worked over the head, loud, wet sounds escaping.

“Oh, fuck,” Tony gasped out, dropping flat on his back and grabbing a handful of blond hair. “Christ, oh bless you, you fast learner.”

He didn't make much noise after that, just faint appreciative groans and murmurs of Steve's name and other words she couldn't make out. She watched in fascination as Steve worked him over, taking Tony deep into his throat and holding him there for a few seconds, then pulling back to stroke him with a firm, fast fist and just licking and sucking at the head. He alternated, one then the other, until Bryce had learned the differences in the sounds that Tony made. The murmured words when Steve pushed him in deep, and higher, sharper sounds as Steve stroked him fast.

She'd watched porn a few times in her life, no real fascination in it. The first time had been basic scientific curiosity about the whole concept. Watching other people have sex...it didn't do much for her. She could appreciate the eroticism of it, but she wasn't entirely sure how people got off to it.

This. God, this was so much different. The pleasure in Tony's face, in his voice. The intensity in Steve's eyes, the hungry sounds that escaped. She knew these men, and cared about them, and they were absolutely _beautiful_ together.

She had a feeling that she could watch nothing but this, touch herself until she came, and she'd call it a wonderful night.

When Tony came he was surprisingly undramatic about it. His voice rose and strained and cracked, and his body arched up, and then he was panting and spent against the mattress.

She wasn't sure what she expected from Steve, but he swallowed without hesitation, and took his time licking and suckling at Tony's cock afterward until Tony was making pained noises and grasping for his shoulder to urge him away.

Steve sat back on his heels, licking his lips and looking incredibly proud of himself. And rightfully – Tony was limp on the bed, wasted. It was a pretty amazing sight given how hard it was to hold Tony still for any amount of time normally.

Bryce was definitely no longer sleepy, and despite coming more that morning than she had in years she could feel the want, the pulse between her legs.

Steve looked over at her, and she smiled and held her arms open. “Your turn,” she said softly.

He groaned and reached down, grasping himself through his boxers and squeezing. Too close to the edge after Tony, she guessed, and it was pretty intense to think that the idea of being inside of her was steering him nearer to that edge.

“Go on, tiger,” Tony murmured, rolling over on his side, limp but apparently still eager to watch. “We know you're close already. We'll just consider this a trial run.”

Steve flushed but didn't argue. He turned and shifted down the bed, crawling up to Bryce and settling against her. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him into a kiss, groaning at the realization that the salty bite on his tongue was the taste of Tony.

He braced himself with a hand on the mattress but was still solid and broad enough to all but envelope her. It was disconcerting – she wasn't someone who was comfortable with the idea of being overpowered – but it did nothing to quell the desire she felt. She only broke away from the kiss to look for Tony, feeling strange and vulnerable and wanting him close.

He met her eyes from near the foot of the bed, and he smiled. But he must have seen something in her expression because he pushed himself up to his knees and made his way up to them, dropping with a sigh beside Bryce and reaching out to grasp her hand.

“Ready for this, sweetheart?” he asked with a heavy smile.

Bryce clutched at his hand. “Upon reflection I think I do like that,” she said softly. “The nickname, I mean.” She looked up at Steve, slipping her other hand up his chest and to the side of his face. “I'm ready. I want it. Fuck me, Steve.”

He drew back to pull off his boxers, revealing a cock that was obviously as affected by the serum as the rest of his body – thick, long, perfectly proportioned to the rest of his mouth-wateringly solid body. Pink as his cheeks when he blushed, and uncut.

She made a faint sound, want and nervousness all at once. “Slowly,” she reminded him as he settled back in on top of her. “No blood.”

He nodded, and he looked surprisingly clear-headed for as painfully hard as he had to be at that point.

She was stretched thanks to Tony, more than wet enough to ease his way in, but the press of the head of his cock against her made her hiss. Steve froze, braced up on his arms and shuddering for control.

The faint burn of being stretched around him came and went as her body adjusted, and she caught her breath and opened eyes she didn't realize she'd shut, looking up at him and nodding.

“Oh man. Oh god.” Steve sank in, moving in gentle, shallow pushes, and his voice escaped him in tight little bursts. “Tony. Oh god, Tony...”

“It's good, huh?” Tony brought Bryce's hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. “I told you. I knew she'd feel great around you, pulling you in. You're doing great, babe, just don't lose control yet.”

Steve made a desperate whining sound, but fisted his hands in the sheets on either side of her and obeyed Tony, holding on to his control as he slipped deeper inside of her.

Bryce wanted to be as supportive as Tony, as attentive and aware of Steve's struggle. But he was pushing into her little by little, the stretch of him burning but thick and full inside her until her head was spinning. All she could do was grasp at his arms weakly and fight not to ignore her own advice and impale herself on him.

“Look at her, Steve, Christ. Look how good you're making her feel. Bryce, you're doing great. A little more now. Almost there. You can take it, sweetheart.”

Tony's voice was doing things to her insides, and she wanted to hush him but she wanted to beg him to keep talking, to paint the image of Steve fucking her in loud, lewd terms.

When Steve was finally sheathed inside of her, he was trembling from exertion, from holding himself back. Bryce whimpered and shifted against him, so full of him that she could barely breathe.

“Fuck me,” she said, pleaded, her body aching for movement, for friction and heat and glide. “Steve...”

He gasped out a breath like a sob and moved, pulling carefully up and then pushing back in. One more, then two, of those experimental slow thrusts, and suddenly his hips jerked into motion. He thrust deep inside of her as if wanting to make sure that he could, and his pleasured groan was all but drowned out by hers.

Tony was right, he was already too close to the edge to last long, but it only took about a minute before Bryce was crying out as one more orgasm was torn from her, and after that it was all that she could do to lift her hips to meet his eager thrusts.

When Steve came he cried out Bryce's name like a call for help. His hips kept moving, shallow, all grace and rhythm gone, until finally he pushed free of her body and dropped heavily to the bed beside her, shivering.

Much like first thing that morning, Bryce found herself surrounded. This time she was flat on her back, completely wrung out and unable to move. On one side Steve lay, still trying to catch his breath, on his side and all but draped against her. On her other side, still holding her hand up near the pillow, Tony lay already half asleep. 

Exhaustion and the sweat dampening her skin might have made her shiver, but the men in bed with her radiated heat, and she found herself much like last night, seduced down into heavy, black sleep thanks to exhaustion and sheer overwhelming comfort. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to get more done in this chapter, but everyone just kept TALKING. At least it does advance the plot a bit. Also, Betty and Bryce's friendship has become one of my favorite things about this story, which I was not expecting at all. 
> 
> Anyway, on we go.

The next time she woke up she was alone, no bodies sprawled against her, no breathing in her ears.

She opened her eyes and stretched herself out luxuriously. The bathroom door was closed, the muted sounds of the shower coming through, which told her where at least one of them was.

But Bryce wasn't particularly worried about it. She knew the two men well enough to know that if they were planning to simply run out on her they never would have invited her up in the first place. Anyway, having some time to herself was a relief.

Her body felt oddly tired, heavy-limbed. Like she'd had a workout, though she hadn't actually done a lot of the work earlier. It was a decadent feeling, being limp and wrung out and warm all over, feeling the distant ache between her legs, the burn of stretched muscle. Even that was decadent, the discomfort that made it easier for her to accept how _good_ she otherwise felt.

The whole morning seemed unreal to Bryce. God knew she hadn't gone to Tony's room the night before planning to jump right into sleeping with them. Christ, if she had thought that was even a possibility she probably would have talked herself out of going down there.

But it happened so fluidly, so naturally, her fears simply never had a chance to make themselves heard. She forgot to be nervous, forgot that sex for her had always been something perfunctory, and she wasn't supposed to let go and simply enjoy the pleasure.

She had always been too contained to really enjoy it, really. It usually felt good - that hadn't been her first orgasm – but the trade-off always made it more trouble than it was worth. She had never been good at letting herself be vulnerable with anyone, and you didn't get much more vulnerable than being laid bare and touched so intimately, even penetrated.

Steve and Tony had rendered that part of her silent somehow. They had guided her right past the switch that should have flipped and made her too self-conscious and nervous to really enjoy herself. There hadn't been anything but the two of them and her, and the glide of their hands on her body and their bodies under her hands, and the pleasure was indescribable, of course, but the letting go part was...

Well. If she thought about it too much she would start making herself nervous.

Luckily the bathroom door opened after just another couple of minutes. Steve appeared, towel wrapped around his waist, hair combed as neatly as always, skin still steaming from the shower.

He smiled when he saw her awake. “Good morning, again.”

Bryce returned the smile and sat up, the sheets pooling at her waist. At least being openly nude was something she had experience with, thanks to misadventures with the Thing. “What time is it?”

“JARVIS?”

“ _Twelve thirty-seven PM, captain,”_ JARVIS answered smoothly.

“Tony's down in his workshop,” Steve mentioned, approaching the bed. He stopped on the way and picked up her t-shirt and pants from where they'd been thrown earlier, and he brought them over to her. “He had work to do, he said that he's running behind.”

Bryce took the shirt with a soft thank you and pulled it right-side-out, slipping it on. “Tony has no deadlines that don't exist in his own mind,” she pointed out.

Steve nodded. “I think he needed time to himself, to process. Tony...he doesn't like people to know that he takes things more seriously than he pretends to. He vanished for a straight twenty-four hours after the first time he and I...” He shrugged.

Bryce was a little surprised by that. Not that Tony took this all more seriously than he acted, but that he went off on his own to process it. That was very much something she herself did, and he was far more extroverted than she was.

Steve studied her, sitting down on the edge of the bed. He seemed to note her surprise, though he apparently mistook the reason for it. “This means a lot to him, you know. He jokes, he hides it, but...last night, after we left your room and were so uncertain about what you might choose, he was shaken. It was the first time all week he and I didn't...um, you know. It was the first time we went straight to sleep.”

Bryce laughed softly at the pink against his cheeks. There was something incredibly endearing about a man who, hours after fucking her, still blushed when mentioning sex with her. In her experience most men took a night together as a sign that they were free to become as blatantly coarse and handsy as they wanted to be.

Then she thought about what he said, and about Tony greeting her after she arrived last night. The wide, sweet smile on his face when he realized that she wanted to stay. The way he pulled her close after they got into bed, urging her to curl into him.

She smiled to herself, wondering if that was who Tony would be in the context of a relationship. A grinning charmer who snuck romantic moments in when he thought he could get away with it without his reputation being threatened.

Her smile turned itself to Steve, glad that he had already learned and accepted that aspect of Tony. Steve really was much more perceptive than she gave him credit for.

He colored a little darker at her silent smile, and gestured towards the bathroom. “Shower's free, if you want.”

She drew her legs up and pushed the covers down, sliding to the edge of the bed and standing to pull her pants on. “I should get down to my room, get some clothes. I didn't work at all yesterday, I can't miss two days in a row.”

“Because you have deadlines to meet?” Steve asked.

She turned to him, nodding at the understanding on his face. “Same as Tony, yeah.”

He reached out and hooked his fingers around hers. “You're okay, though?”

She moved in, slipping between his legs and leaning down to kiss him briefly. “I'm better than I have been in years,” she admitted softly against his mouth.

He relaxed and grasped her hand for a moment before letting her go. “In that case, I might as well spend a few hours in the gym.”

Not processing, she thought, not Steve. Steve didn't need time to himself, or to run though complicated mental gymnastics to categorize and document everything they had been through in the last day.

Steve was a complicated, perceptive, challenging man, but Steve accepted the world as it was. Maybe that came from facing down his own death and then somehow waking up with the entire world changed around him. Maybe that helped him to take life as it came, to take nothing for granted and accept what he had instantly and totally.

It was enviable, in a melancholy kind of way. He had lost everything to end up in that bedroom with her, from friends and family to the world as he knew it. God, even telephones were complicated devices that he had to relearn from scratch.

She reached out with her free hand and neatened a stray lock of damp hair against his temple. “Are you happy?”

Steve blinked, but his fingers threaded through hers and held on tightly. He didn't answer right away, giving the question some consideration. Something else to appreciate about him – he took her words seriously, even a question like that that could have so easily been answered with a hand wave and dismissed.

After a moment he smiled, small and crooked, and when he spoke it was like the answer was news to him. “I'm getting there fast,” he said. 

 

* * *

 

Bryce was rinsing conditioner from her hair under the steaming jets of her ridiculously nice shower when her hands started shaking. She pulled them from her hair and held them up, watching them twitch and shiver noticeably.

It didn't take long for her breathing to follow, going fast and thin.

She screwed her shivering hands into fists and finished rinsing her hair out, then turned the water off and stepped out fast, grabbing a towel and drying herself off.

She'd had a panic attack once, after being fired on by an entire Army division in the middle of Culver. She had been taking a shower then, too, in a cheap motel with Betty out buying her a change of clothes. The rush of the shower had turned into distantly-remembered machine gun fire, and the spray hit her body like bullets, and she found herself curled in the tub, hyperventilating and sure that she was having a heart attack.

This...this wasn't that. This was nothing. She was fine. There was nothing to panic about, anyway. Freaking out after such an incredible morning made no sense.

She dressed herself and brushed her hair, pushing her breath in and out, ignoring the shaking in her hands and the pool of heavy cold forming in her gut, like she'd swallowed a stone. She got into the elevator to get down to the lab, and laughed unsteadily when she realized that she couldn't work with her hands that way.

Luckily Betty answered on the second ring, voice wary. She told Bryce over Skype when she gave her that cell number that very few people had it. “ _Hello?”_

Bryce hesitated, her opening words - 'I think I'm dying' – contemplated and then dismissed as way too alarmist. Luckily just the sound of Betty's voice did something to sooth Bryce's prickling nerves, and she breathed in and out.

“It's me,” she said finally.

“ _Hey, stranger!”_ Wariness gone instantly, Betty sounded like she was smiling. “ _I'm glad you called. I'm in the office, want to Skype?”_

Bryce straightened as the elevator door opened. She moved down the corridor to her lab and relaxed when the door was shut behind her, and only the quiet hum of equipment was around her.

“ _Bryce?”_

“Sorry, I...look, your father made an appearance here yesterday. He might be monitoring your computers.”

Betty cursed, suddenly muffled, and Bryce smiled faintly at the memory of many a phone call with some professor or adviser that had required Betty to set her phone against her shoulder and swear like a sailor before responding professionally.

“ _I suppose I'm not surprised. He called the house last week and talked to Len. Tried to get my number.”_

Bryce sat down against the back counter near the hematology system. She shut her eyes and focused on breathing. “How'd that go?”

“ _Hey, I told you, Len hates him even more than I do after what happened at Culver. Dad would have had better luck if I'd answered the phone. Not_ good _luck, but better. You know Len feels awful for what happened.”_

“Yeah.” Betty had told Bryce as much before, but even more telling was the fact that Betty had married him after getting back to Virginia. Bryce had no doubt she would have left him if she blamed him for anything that happened, or suspected that it might happen again.

“ _You know, I never told you this, but...you remember when I left that hotel to pawn my mother's necklace to get us to New York?”_

Bryce blinked. “And you somehow got like a thousand dollars for it? Yeah.”

“ _Well. That was actually Len. I called him, he wired the money. I just didn't say anything because I thought you would freak out.”_

Bryce laughed. “That day, I would have.”

Betty sounded pleased. _“He said that dad had been at the house, but when it was clear Len wasn't going to help anymore he left. Dad was so sure that I was on the run with my old lover that he didn't even leave anyone to watch the poor deluded man I left behind, or listen in case I tried to call. He told Len as much, that I was as good as gone, back to my heathen lesbian life.”_ She laughed cheerfully.

Bryce felt her breathing even out, opening her eyes finally, glad when the world wasn't shaking or looming in around her. “I take it he didn't believe that.”

“ _Len? Not for a second. You're my best friend, of course I told him all about you, including the old stories about us. Besides, he's really incredibly smart about people. Me and my father included. He trusted me.”_

Bryce smiled, something in her warming up to hear those words – you're my best friend – still in present tense. Betty, with a career and husband and life full of stable and ever-present friends, still considered Bryce as important as Bryce considered her.

“Sounds like you found a good one,” she said finally.

“ _Well, he is really horrible at telling jokes, and he tells them_ all the time. _So I wouldn't say he's perfect, but...”_ She laughed. _“Enough about my dad. Though I'm sorry if he found you because of me.”_

“Oh, I'm sure it was inevitable. Like you said before, everyone knows about New York. He has to have known that the 'Hulk' was teamed up with Iron Man, I'm surprised he didn't come calling sooner.”

“ _Iron Man? Oh, God, don't tell me you're staying with Tony Stark?”_ Betty laughed. _“That's about as conspicuous as you could get.”_

Bryce chuckled her agreement. “I enjoyed that, the irony of hiding in the third most famous landmark in New York City. It looks like they're serious about this Avengers thing, so I might be here for a while.”

“ _Perfect! I'll take a few days off soon and come visit!”_

“Do that. Bring Leonard. He'll have a field day trying to psychoanalyze Tony.”

She laughed. _“Deal. Now, let's talk about why when I first answered the phone you sounded like you were about to hyperventilate.”_

Bryce hesitated at that, smiling to herself. Of course Betty caught it. Hell, she'd probably rambled on about Len and her dad because she knew that Bryce needed time to get herself together.

“ _Bryce? What's wrong?”_

“Nothing,” she answered quietly. She paused, smiling faintly. “I think that's the problem.”

“ _Oh?”_

“Everything's...I don't know. Everything was good, and then suddenly...it was even better, and...and for some reason I almost went into cardiac arrest because of that. Literally the only thing wrong is the General showing up here, but I'm not even really worried about him. I'm safe where I am.”

“ _I see.”_

Bryce sighed. “No, I mean it doesn't make sense, I know. Even if I thought Ross could get his hands on me, the Thing would stop him. But he won't. Tony and Steve won't...won't let him. I haven't really given him much thought after...maybe that's the problem. I have to stop internalizing worries like that. Maybe--”

“ _Bryce. I adore you, but I really doubt that's what's going on here.”_ Betty paused, but the smile didn't fade from her voice. _“How long has it been since you had a chance to really relax?”_

Bryce blinked. “Well. I don't know, since the accident, I guess.”

“ _Exactly. Have you really had a single happy day since then? Wait, don't answer that, I already know and it'll make me sad to hear it. You do realize that actually finding happiness when you're not used to it can be as stressful as misery, right?”_

She let out a breath. “This isn't...I mean--”

“ _You were happy last time we talked. Has something changed since then? Maybe something involving Tony Stark, or...who else did you say? Steve? Wait, Bryce, you're talking about Steve Rogers? Captain America? He was in that fight too.”_

Bryce laughed quietly. “I keep forgetting that they're well-known. But...yeah. It might involve them.”

“ _...both of them?”_ Betty's voice was thin.

“Maybe.” Bryce laughed at the pause that followed. “Just...it's not...it's new.”

“ _Wow. Way to make up for lost time, lady.”_ Betty let out a whoosh of breath, laughing warmly. _“But okay, that just proves my point. It's new. You have to give yourself some time to adjust to it.”_

Bryce humphed out a breath, unsatisfied.

“ _Well, we're both scientists, so look at it like this: it's regression to the mean. Every high and every low eventually adjusts back to the average. Your average...let's face it, it's pretty low after the last few years. Which is another thing: you're so used to recovering from lows that you don't know how it feels to come down from the highs. It must feel like coming off a drug.”_

Bryce frowned, thinking about that. “Christ, does that mean every time I have a good day it's going to lead to a panic attack?”

Betty laughed, gentle. _“Well, that's the good thing about suddenly having good days. Your average will adjust, you won't have as far to fall. You have a new normal now, so you'll get used to the new average and hope it's better than the old one was. Which, let's face it, is inevitable.”_

“Ain't that the truth,” Bryce murmured.

“ _God, I miss this. I miss talking you through your perplexities about basic feelings, you awkward thing, you.”_

“Oh, shut up.” Bryce laughed, though, and stood up on legs that no longer felt like they were leaning towards a collapse. “You used to be as awkward as I am. Not my fault I got cheated out of natural life development after...oh, actually, it kind of _was_ my fault.”

“ _No one's fault, Bryce. An accident. Still, you're joking but I hope you realize that that's exactly what happened. You've been cheated out of a normal life, and I'm really happy to hear that you might have a chance at it now.”_

Bryce flushed suddenly, thinking about normality and the beast in her blood.

Something in the back of her mind flared, like the striking of a match. The same focused-beam excitement that she felt the other day when helping Tony find the discrepancy in calculations that was reducing the arc reactor's power in his suits.

She moved to a computer monitor fast. “Hey. I had an idea. I need to...”

“ _I recognize that tone of voice. Just promise you'll call me back soon. I'm serious about coming to visit.”_

“You got it.” Bryce forced her distracted mind back into focus for a moment then. “And thank you. For the talk, and for still being willing to be my voice of reason.”

“ _Any time. I love you, Bryce, you know that.”_

Bryce grinned. “Love you too, Betty. I'll call you soon.”

She hung up and set the phone aside on the counter, calling up the display on the computer. Her mind went to earlier that morning, to the literally-hormonal form of pillow talk she and Tony had dived into before Steve groused them out of it.

Dopamine. Seratonin, oxytocin. There was a validity to the theory that those things could inhibit the corticotropin-releasing hormone secretion into the hypophysis and eventually reduce the norepinephrine release in the cardiovascular system.

She was finally in a place where she could test out her theories about the change being brought about by both heart rate and a flood of specific hormones. She'd been developing the theory for a while out there in the world where she couldn't test it out, and while in the lab she had been too unsure of her place there to waste time looking into her own condition.

But she had a new confidence now, and a trust that Tony would encourage her trying to help herself out.

She got to work, fingers flying to lock those hypotheses into notes she could store into the system.

Basic hypothesis: Part one - heart rate alone wasn't enough to bring about the change, evidenced by time spent literally on the run, fleeing for her life through miles of jungle or Brazilian _favela._ Easy to test out, she just needed a heart rate monitor and a treadmill. Part two: anger and fear alone wasn't enough to bring about the change. Evidenced by experience hiding from soldiers and police, or withstanding a thousand various indignities that came with traveling as a woman alone in a male-focused world. (Honestly, the first time a man called her a cunt for not returning his advances on a bus in the middle of the California desert would have made her change if anger alone caused it.) Could be tested with adrenaline shots or monitored exposure to stimulus meant to provoke anger and fear.

Part three, and conclusion – both increased heartrate _and_ the presence of biochemicals from a fear/anger/danger response were required to generate the change.

In her heart she already suspected that the hypothesis was accurate, but she wouldn't trust the lives of people around her to a hunch or instinct. She wanted pure, undeniable scientific evidence. And once she had it, once she had turned hypothesis into real theory, she could come up with a suppressant.

It wouldn't cure her. The very cells of her body were infused and mutated by gamma radiation, there wasn't a cure for that. She considered looking into the idea of bone marrow transplantation and whether it would lead to her body generating clean and non-irradiated blood cells, but that was something else she hadn't been about to explore out there in the world without proper equipment. Her hunch was that it wouldn't work, that as fast as the new cells were produced, they would be flooded once again by the gamma in the cells around them. But biomedical theory wasn't her specialty, so that was something she could dive into after this first hypothesis was explored.

Buzzing from excitement and the sheer joy of working out hypothesis and plotting out testing phases made her grin as she finished up her quick shorthanded notes and twisted to regard her lab.

First thing: blood samples. If she were anyone else she would head down to the medical wing of Stark Industries' R&D division. But her blood was too toxic for her to risk anyone else.

There were vials and syringes along with a thousand other pieces of equipment in the closets back behind the hematology analyzer, and luckily the call to Betty and her own distraction meant that her hands were steady enough to actually draw her own blood.

Once she had a series of vials collected, she labeled them neatly and slid the tray into a refrigeration unit. She could synthesize more samples easily, she had everything she needed in that lab. First, though, she needed to pay a visit downstairs to the Stark chemistry labs and see what kind of hormone products they had in supply.

There was a chime over her head as she was disposing of the syringe and the cotton swabs used to blot the blood at the injection site. She was incredibly paranoid about her blood infecting someone else, as far as she was concerned it had to be a thoroughly disposed of as pure radiation.

“ _Captain Rogers would like a word, Doctor.”_

“Thanks, JARVIS. Steve?”

“ _Hey, if you're at a good stopping place would you like to come up and have a late lunch with us? We still need to talk about General Ross.”_

She sighed, but he was right. Ross didn't worry her as much as he could have, but he wasn't to be dismissed as harmless, either. “Yeah, I'll be up in a couple of minutes.” 

 

* * *

 

“How's this sound to you?” were Tony's greeting words as Bryce moved through the door into the wide den that had been their general hang-out for the last few weeks. “'Retired General Thaddeus Ross.'”

He was back behind the bar, beaming out at her as he fixed himself a drink. He had the inevitable oil smudge along his jaw that meant he was fresh from the workshop. On the other side of the wide room Steve was moving around the kitchen, still wearing sweat-dampened gym clothes.

Bryce hesitated, sending Steve a smile before approaching the bar. “I'd prefer 'disgraced and dishonorably discharged former general', but I'd take retired.”

Tony grinned. “Well, I had my pal Rhodey look into the General to see what's going on with him, and if his threats to you were based in some actual legitimate movement to get you back into Army custody. Come to find that Ross is as big a thorn in the Army's side as he is in yours. Ever since New York he's being pushed not so subtly into retirement.”

“Really?” Bryce thought about that, sitting up on the stool in front of the bar. “So they didn't take the Thing's help as proof that this project really is worth recovering?”

“I wouldn't say that, but they're awfully sure that Ross is not the guy they want leading it. If you ask me he brought about his own undoing years ago, with Blonsky. It's just taken its time to catch up to him. Maybe because of the publicity New York got, and the fact that there's nothing classified about the Hulk's existence anymore. Er, the Thing, whatever.”

She smiled. “I'm getting used to Hulk.”

Tony returned the smile, raising his glass as if in salute. “Rhodey says there's been some activity with Blonsky lately, some attempt to recover the soldier underneath the creature, but it's been useless. Their only hope would have been to get their hands on you, figure out why your body has such a different reaction than Blonsky's did, and hope they could develop another serum closer to replicating you than him. But after all these years there's no real hope in it. You're being called a fluke, and Blonsky the standard. It's just not worth it, especially now that you're under the protection of SHIELD and the Avengers and they can't possibly get you into their hands without a huge PR nightmare. Which I would happily cause, at least for the short time they'd have you before we came busting in to get you out.”

“My hero,” Bryce said dryly, though the smile she shot him was sincere. “So...is that it? There's nothing to worry about from Ross?”

Tony hesitated. “Well. That's the thing.”

“Come on, you two. Food.”

Bryce hesitated as Tony moved around the bar. “I want to know what the thing is.”

“Come on.” Tony approached her and looped a hand around her arm, tugging her up and along with him towards the kitchen. “I'll tell you while we're eating.”

The thing, Tony explained once they were settled in around a platter of sandwiches assembled by Steve – which was so unbearably domestic that Bryce had to grin at the idea – was hard to explain.

“According to Rhodey they've been ushering Ross towards retirement for a few months, but after New York there stopped being anything subtle about it. He's been told basically to walk away willingly or get pushed out.”

“I wouldn't call that a problem,” Bryce answered. “It's kind of warming my heart a little, honestly.”

“Here here,” Tony said with a grin, toasting with a heft of his sandwich. “But then it makes the whole last couple of weeks confusing, doesn't it? Ross knows he's done, he knows he won't have any official support for anything he does, especially involving you. So...”

“Why is he suddenly here throwing his weight around when he doesn't actually have any weight anymore,” Bryce concluded.

Tony nodded.

“A bluff?” Steve suggested, regarding them both thoughtfully, his brow creased. “Maybe he hopes that if he can get Bryce into his custody it will change their minds?”

Tony hesitated, setting his food down and grabbing a napkin, threading it through his fingers absently. “Okay, take this as you will, but here's my problem: I have done a lot of business with a lot of blustering, conceited idiots in my life. It's a hazard of the company. A few years ago most of those blustering idiots wore military uniforms. My company wouldn't have thrived the way it did if I hadn't learned to tell when people were full of it and when they could back their words up.”

“And you don't think he's bluffing,” Steve concluded.

“Ross is good at being full of shit,” Tony answered, “I can tell. I've known him for years. And this time he means everything he's been saying. If he's really on some edge, desperate because of his career ending, I had no clue until I talked to Rhodey. It doesn't show on him in the slightest in person.” Tony sat back with a frown. “I have no idea what makes him think that he's still a threat to me, but he's promised to ruin this company, seize my assets, and otherwise completely destroy me unless I stop hiding Bryce here. And from everything I could tell during those meetings, he is sure that he can do it.”

Bryce set her half-eaten sandwich down, her appetite shrinking into a cold stone at the bottom of her stomach. Ross didn't scare her, but if he made Tony nervous that was cause for concern right there.

Of course Tony didn't seem nervous, just annoyed that there was something to this that he didn't know.

“He showed up here with a jeep full of soldiers,” Bryce pointed out after a minute. “I saw them down in the lobby on my way out, that's what brought me up to your office.”

Tony winced at the memory, but nodded. “He's still a general, maybe he has some authority. Maybe they were freelancers. I can't see him visiting Stark Tower on the Army's dime, knowing that his pursuit of you is what makes him such a liability.”

“You think he's working with someone else.” Steve spoke suddenly, eyes sharp on Tony.

Tony looked at both him and Bryce, then sighed. “Look, there are plenty of governments out there who would pursue Bryce as fanatically as Ross does. Outside of that there are groups, the Ten Rings, al Qaeda, terrorist groups with a hell of a lot of firepower and an interest in acquiring a human weapon whether they think they can recreate it or not. Even corporations, weapons manufacturers, that would kill for a super-soldier serum to sell to the world. Stark Industries would have welcomed a first-hand look at the Hulk a few years back,” he admitted, looking uncomfortable at the idea.

“Stark Industries wouldn't have threatened or kidnapped to get that look,” Steve answered confidently. “But the point stands – barring the US Army there are plenty of people who might want to get their hands on Bryce, and might have gone to Ross knowing of his obsession, and influenced him into coming to work for them once the Army threw him out.”

“Exactly.” Tony drew in a breath and whooshed it out, turning to Bryce. “So. Good news/bad news situation here, really. We're not at risk of pissing off the federal government of the United States, which is a yay for us. On the flip side we seem to be pissing _someone_ off, and so far I have no idea who.”

Bryce nodded slowly, looking down at her plate of food.

“We might have to consider,” Steve said slowly, “getting SHIELD involved in this.”

“Hate to say it, but that's not a bad idea. Fury owes us anyway. I'm also thinking that we need to find out who Ross is working with these days. Quickest way to do that would be to ask him. As forcefully as we need to.”

Bryce looked up at that, studying Tony.

Steve looked uneasy, but he didn't instantly refute the idea. “We could have a conversation with Natasha. Just a conversation, for now.”

“Or,” Bryce said quietly.

“No,” they both answered at once.

She blinked, surprised, and peered up at them.

Steve spoke fast, vehement. “Even putting aside how we feel about you personally, the fact is that there are people out there trying to get their hands on what could be considered a deadly weapon, and are powerful enough to have influenced a US General into helping them. What's the point of the Avengers if we don't do something about that? Letting you leave would be the single worst way to handle this. We'd have to use hours and energy on tracking you that could be devoted solely to finding out who our enemies are.”

“And we _would_ track you, Bryce. No matter where you went.” Tony spoke the words darkly.

Bryce hesitated, and couldn't resist a sudden smile. The smile turned to a chuckle, but she clamped her lips together shut to stifle it.

They peered at her, and Tony raised eyebrows suddenly. “You weren't going to offer to leave,” he guessed.

She shook her head. “No. Not this time. You were pretty clear last night what you both think about that idea.” She smiled. “But thanks for reiterating your objections.”

“What was your suggestion, then?” Steve asked, his cheeks touched with pink.

She shrugged. “Seems like the fastest way to get to the bottom of Ross's plans would be to give him exactly what he wants.”

“No,” they both said in unison, again, and just as vehemently.

She raised her eyebrows.

Tony and Steve exchanged looks, and for two men who were at each other's throats so often they were eerie when they were in sync on something. They seemed to share a whole silent conversation in a moment's glance, and when they looked back at her they seemed to be completely in concert.

“No,” Steve said again. “We have absolutely no idea who or what we're up against, there's way too much risk in handing you over without any idea what to expect.”

“If these people have enough reach or power you could be out of our reach in minutes. I trust my tech, we could find a way to track and follow you, but that's not enough.”

She regarded Tony. “Are you sure--”

“No, Bryce.” Tony met her eyes grimly. “Just no. It's simply not an option. End of discussion.”

She sighed. “Fine. It's not an option _yet._ But if we do learn enough that it becomes an option we're going to talk about it.”

“Fine. If and when.” Steve pushed his own plate away as if the mere idea wiped his appetite away.

She smiled faintly. “Somehow I think you've stopped putting aside your personal feelings about me.”

“Damn right we have,” Tony answered. “And we should. Because it's a factor.”

Steve reached across the table, holding his hand out. “We've lost too much already, Bryce. All of us. We deserve to have something we can keep.”

She drew in an unsteady breath, caught off guard by the intent, sincere response. She took his hand and he gripped her tightly.

“I say we get Natasha here tonight, treat her to any take-out her little Russian heart desires, and talk about options.” Tony grinned suddenly. “And afterward we head back to the bedroom and have ourselves a replay of this morning.”

Bryce rolled her eyes, squeezing Steve's hand before drawing her arm back. “Is Natasha invited to that, too?” she asked, mostly joking.

But Tony's eyes narrowed and his answer was surprisingly intense, maybe even dark: “We don't share,” he said, the words clipped.

Bryce flushed and felt a tug in her gut, a loosening of that cold stone sitting there. Not that she thought Tony was kidding about actually having a relationship and not simply looking for random bedmates, but there was something pretty flattering about the idea that Bryce was invited somewhere that the stunning and dangerous Natasha Romanoff wasn't. At least it confirmed that despite Tony's standard reaction to Bryce's story about Betty, he didn't actually welcome the idea of watching her with another woman.

“Just kidding,” she said after a moment, smiling faintly.

Tony relaxed a little. “Yeah. Just...gonna have to expect us to feel a little possessive, considering everything.”

She hesitated, thinking that over. Possessiveness wasn't exactly a huge turn-on for her, considering how much she chafed under the idea of any kind of authority. In a relationship, especially, she couldn't quite shake the shadow of her father and his violent jealousy of time her mother spent with Bryce.

But she did understand, and it didn't really make her grow tense, this idea that at least for a while Tony and Steve might be a little vehement in their defense of her. It was...comforting, in a way.

She sat back, picking up the sandwich she'd lost her appetite for earlier, and with a smile she ate. 

 

* * *

 

She went to her rooms instead of going back to the lab once lunch was over. She spent a couple of hours sitting in the living room, putting together an order for supplies needed for the batch of experiments she wanted to run on her blood, and afterward she decided that she could use a little time detoxifying herself.

She ended up shutting herself in her dark stone bathroom, filling up the deep tub and taking the first hot bath she could remember having since her impromptu collapse in a hotel tub a few years back.

There was an odd mix of things that she needed to find some mental equilibrium over. Like Betty said, even the good changes apparently stressed her out, and it felt strange having two people to suddenly answer to about things like endangering her own life. They hadn't exactly had a conversation about what a 'relationship' actually meant for the three of them.

Except that they apparently didn't share.

Over all that was the looming presence of Ross, who maybe wasn't a worry in and of himself but seemed to represent a need to worry about whoever he was working with. There was a chance that Tony was wrong, that Ross was simply full of his own bombast and that getting his hands on Bryce was a desperate last-ditch attempt to fend off his forcible retirement.

But Tony was better with people than Bryce was, and God knew he wasn't the kind to worry about things if there was any alternative. If he was worried then it meant she needed to be worried too.

Later, though.

She lay back in the bathtub and let her muscles relax in the steaming water, eyes shut and mind seeking to find a balance between the good and the bad that was suddenly filling up her life. In a way, being on the run had been so much simpler than all this. She had to worry about eating, sleeping, fending off the elements, and not being caught. Much easier than thinking about negotiating personal relationships and facing the specter of a threat that was aimed at more than just her.

Easier, but maybe not better.

After all, this was the first time in years that she actually had goals in mind. While she was on the run she really didn't have anything to look forward to. No aims to work towards. She had this unspoken and mostly unformed idea about doing good deeds, trying to make up for the damage and deaths she had caused when the Thing first came unleashed. But there was no end goal. She couldn't think about curing herself, or starting a relationship or facing any of the faceless enemies who pursued her.

It was better to have something to aim for. To work for more than just the idea of repairing a sense of unbalanced karma.

She needed goals to achieve. She always had. She was an ambitious woman years ago, determined to make her mark on the world, and though that quality had led her to the accident that destroyed her old life, it was also an intrinsic part of her. Ignoring it, becoming an aimless wanderer, could never have worked on a long-term basis.

The stress and the fears and the tension were all a part of getting back a little of who she used to be. Maybe if she kept that in mind, she could balance the stress out in her mind.

With that thought she opened her eyes and sighed to herself. “JARVIS, what time is Natasha...”

The lights flickered around her, off and then on a couple of times.

She sat up in the water, frowning. Stark Tower ran on Tony's giant arc reactor. It wasn't exactly subject to the power whims of the electric company. Her mind instantly turned that brief flicker of lights into an attack on the Tower itself, and though she knew it was alarmist she couldn't fight a rush of apprehension.

“JARVIS, what was that? Is everything okay out there?”

And as the seconds ticked by without a reply, Bryce knew that she was right.

Something was very, very wrong.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, I haven't given up on this story, honest. It's coming slowly, but I know what's coming. I just have to write it. Next chapter will have a little more fluff before the real drama hits. Thanks for everyone who's stuck with me through the delay.

 

“JARVIS.” Her voice was strong, sharp, as if she just had to seem like she meant business in order to make JARVIS answer. Like Tony's AI was just being recalcitrant not answering her the first two times.

Silence.

Unnerving, especially considering that she was currently naked in a tub of water, which wasn't the kind of place she wanted to be when tech started failing.

Bryce pushed herself up, gripping the side of the tub and stretching out to grab the towel that hung just on the wall to the right. Whatever this was, it had to be huge. JARVIS _was_ Stark Tower. If JARVIS was compromised then they were being attacked by something far more serious than a power outage.

As she started to stand there was a hum of noise, and a burst like static. 

Bryce hesitated. She sank down into the water, holding the towel over the rim. Her eyes caught the slightest flicker of movement, and she looked over at the wall.

The monitor. It was flickering the way the lights had a minute ago, on and off and then on again.

Bryce frowned, reaching out to pull the monitor to face her.

The display stayed on, but the picture itself was dark. Blackness and the darker blackness of shadows beyond it. There was no hint of JARVIS's normal displays.

Movement, though, and she squinted at the blackness as it resolved, and her eyes adjusted.

It was a video, or a camera feed. The darker black was the silhouette of...a person? No. The proportions were all off. Too top-heavy, too round and broad. If it was a person they were wearing the strangest headgear she had ever seen.

“ _Hello, Doctor Banner,”_ came a sudden voice through the monitor. A heavily-modulated voice, obviously disguised. It was more computer than person.

Bryce hissed out a breath through her teeth but stared at that display, intent, ready to remember everything about that voice and those barely-moving shadows that she could.

“ _It's nice to speak to you again. I wish the circumstances were better.”_ It must have been a recording; there was no pause for her to respond. _“I hate to jump right into business, but the pleasantries can wait until we're face to face. You have exactly twenty-four hours to turn yourself over to General Ross. Should you refuse, you will be removed from Stark Tower.”_

The way the voice was disguised meant that it was impossible to read emotions from it, which only added an eerie sense of matter-of-factness to the threat.

“ _We will come to collect you, and we will take as much of the Tower with us as we can. If you doubt our capabilities when it comes to infiltrating Stark's fortress, you should check your lab.”_

The dark figure moved, that strange disproportionate body leaning forward. From lower in the mass than she would have guessed, a hand appeared. Only a lighter grain against the dark shadows, but some unseen light source glinted off of something held in that hand. A gleam of glass.

A vial.

“ _Thanks for the fresh sample. I look forward to taking more from you personally.”_

Bryce shook her head even as the glass vial drew back into the shadows. It looked like...but it wasn't. It couldn't be. She just drew those blood samples a few hours ago. No one could have gotten into her lab and out again undetected. No one could have done it with enough time to record a message and corrupt JARVIS's system in order to send that message.

A trick. It was a trick.

The display flickered again, and the video feed was gone, leaving the monitor just a sheet of blank transparency again.

Bryce almost slipped climbing out of the tub, barely bothering to dry the soap from her skin as she grabbed for her clothes. Her hands were shaking, and apprehension made her heart beat faster. Which meant that the Thing was starting to stir in the back of her mind.

Tony was right. Ross had help, and it sure as hell wasn't the Army. Not if they managed to get through JARVIS. Not if they got into her lab. It wasn't Ross's style. It wasn't the Army, the government, or anyone else Bryce had ever worked with. It was someone who knew what they were doing. Someone who meant business. Someone who had no doubt that she would be in their hands in the next twenty-four hours.

Someone she had met, or spoken to, before. _Nice to speak to you again_ , the disguised voice had said.

She threw on her t-shirt backward, slipping in her bare feet as she darted for the door of the bathroom. “JARVIS?” she blurted as soon as she was through the doorway into her wider front rooms.

Nothing.

Her eyes caught on the closet, sitting open and ready for her to choose clothes for dinner with...Christ. Dinner with the guys.

At the bottom of that closet there was her small duffel bag, empty and shoved out of sight. If Bryce had any sense at all she would have grabbed it and filled it the way she started to the day before, and she would have been gone before JARVIS got back online.

She stood there, her heart thudding loud in her chest, that modulated, eerie voice filling her thoughts. They would come for her, and take whoever they had to out in order to get her. Coming from that flat computerized voice the words seemed less a threat and more a simple statement of fact.

She took a single step towards the closet and that bag, but instead of a strangely-shaped silhouette in darkness her mind instead flashed to Steve sitting on Tony's bed, looking up at her with a smile. She'd asked if he was happy, he said he was getting there.

Tony next, his warm, broad and shadowless smile when he realized that she had showed up at his door in the middle of the night because she wanted to be there. She was saying yes.

If she were smart she would have packed and left. If she were selfless she would have gone without a word or a note, taken the danger of this new threat far away from both men before they had a chance to get hurt by it.

But she couldn't get their smiles from out of her mind. She couldn't stop feeling that strange sense of awe that it was her, Bryce Banner, contaminated and old and exhausted, who made them both smile that way.

God help her, because if she stayed and either of them suffered for it, she would never forgive herself.

She bypassed the bedroom and was out of her room and into the corridor in a flash, barefoot and dripping in a backwards shirt.

“ _Good afternoon, Doctor Banner.”_

She jumped in surprise, but her mind was already ahead, putting it together: JARVIS wasn't compromised building-wide. Just in her rooms, and probably her lab.

“JARVIS. Tell Tony to get down to my lab, now. It's urgent.”

“ _Of course, Doctor.”_

She glanced upwards as she bypassed the elevator and headed for the stairwell, just in case. “Might want to run some diagnostics on your systems inside my rooms, too.”

“ _Your rooms?”_

She pushed open the door and thundered down the stairs, and JARVIS didn't question the words any further.

* * *

 

Bare, spotless counters, clean floors, humming machines. Everything in its place, neat and tidy as she left it. 

But the refrigeration unit was empty.

She shut the door of the unit and turned, looking out at her silent, patient lab. Someone had been there. Someone broke into her space, stole her blood. Left her a video, and a threat.

Someone was really, _really_ starting to piss her off.

Her hands were clenched around the edge of the counter when the door to the lab slid open and Tony came in.

He was in full engineer-wear, sweat and grease streaked over his arms. The arc reactor glowing through his shirt lit a trail into the lab as he looked around. When he spotted her he headed over.

“Tony, listen--”

He didn't let her go on. “Someone made a move. Someone's definitely targeting you, and they've been here, and they're good. They're damn near impossibly good.”

“How did you--”

“JARVIS.” Tony made his way down the rows of machines, worried eyes searching her face and the lab around her. “Called me to come up here, and mentioned you said something about diagnostics on your rooms.” He flashed a smile, a rare one for Tony. Thin-lipped and flat, and it spoke of absolutely nothing happy at all. “Which he thought was absurd, since according to him you don't even have rooms here.”

Bryce blinked at that, and as Tony closed in her hands unclenched from the counter, and her anger eased back into something more thoughtful.

“Someone did get into his system, then.”

Tony nodded, quick and terse. “Convinced him that your half of the 37th floor simply never existed. Convinced my AI in my building that my design had always been different.”

He was furious, and it was more apparent as he got close and she could see the tightness around his mouth, and the way his muscles were clenched tight and ready to unleash on something.

That made it easier, strangely, for Bryce to let go of her own tension. Someone was feeling the rage for her, she could focus on the puzzle of it. “That shouldn't be possible.”

“For about a dozen different reasons, that is completely _im_ possible.” Tony moved past her, looking around, and turned back only when he couldn't spot the immediate problem for himself. “Nobody is smart enough to trick my system. Nobody beats me at my own tech. And _nobody_ gets through JARVIS. He's too good, too self-aware. It shouldn't be possible, and that is... _really_ aggravating to me.”

She nodded. “You were right, for what it's worth. Ross wasn't bluffing.”

“No shit.” Tony flashed a faint, thin-lipped smirk.

Bryce filled him in on her experience in the bathroom, the video and its overt threat and the timeline she was given. Twenty-four hours to put herself in Ross's hands, or they were coming for her.

Tony didn't react beyond a nod until she told him about the missing blood. It was proof that JARVIS had been corrupted beyond simply failing to acknowledge that her rooms existed, but instead of getting even more furious Tony perked up.

“Then someone was here. An actual physical presence. JARVIS!”

“ _Yes, sir?”_

“Get the bots up here. Someone was here, which meant they left some trace of themselves. Hair, fingerprints. Skin cells. I don't care what, but we're going to find it, you got me?”

“ _Yes, sir.”_

Tony clapped Bryce on the arm. “Come on, let's get out of here and stop contaminating evidence. JARVIS, how's the diagnostic coming?”

“ _I have found the source of the corruption, sir.”_ JARVIS's voice, as calm and precise as ever, had a note to it that Bryce had never heard before. Something underneath. He sounded very much like a person who was trying to give a calm report while seething with rage. _“It appears to have infected my system through a data packet received via email.”_

Tony hesitated, leading Bryce through the lab but stopping before they got out the door. “An email virus,” he repeated dubiously. “That our filters didn't catch.”

“ _Not a virus, sir, it appears to be a sophisticated rootkit. None of my programming has been changed, but additional programs were uploaded that affected my current performance. And sir, the originating data packet was sent from SHIELD headquarters.”_

Tony's eyebrows flew up and he whistled lowly. “Well, well. Complicateder and complicateder.”

Bryce looked away from him, from the quirk to his mouth that meant he had gone from being enraged to feeling challenged. She could see the exact second when it became a competition in Tony's head. A game.

SHIELD. She wished she felt more surprised. But whether SHIELD was actually involved or being used by some brilliant outsider, she wasn't surprised in the slightest. They could be behind it. All they had to do was decide that they wanted Bryce's secrets more than they wanted her help, and they would turn on her. They would turn on Tony and Steve in order to get her, of course hoping that Tony and Steve would never find out about their part in it. If they thought they could duplicate her work, build more Hulks, less reluctant and more violent Hulks, that would be all it took to make her a target.

On the other hand, if someone wanted to get through to Tony by going through SHIELD, it was probably not that hard. Agencies like that also tended to be overconfident in their own secrecy. Tony had broken through their firewalls in a matter of hours using external devices. One inside agent, one computer tech open to being bribed, and it would be easy for someone to work through their servers.

It was a mistake. The Avengers, SHIELD, all of it. She never should have returned to civilization. She was happy in Kolkata, damn it, or at least close to happy. She was doing worthwhile things with her life. She never would have known about aliens, about Iron Man and Thor, about any of this crap. She never would have painted a target on her own back. At least not a bigger one than was already there.

“Bryce.”

She pulled herself from her ever-darkening thoughts and focused on Tony again.

The thrill of challenge was gone from his eyes. He was solemn again, studying her. Maybe he understood where her mind was going. “This isn't going to happen again,” he said, his voice low. “Nobody breaks my system twice.”

“ _And if I may offer my apologies, Doctor Banner--”_

“Don't worry about it,” Bryce said fast, unsure if she was comfortable with Tony's AI apologizing to her for being corrupted. “If they had to make a move then better through the computers than blasting their way in.”

JARVIS didn't respond, and Tony didn't look as if he agreed. He would have rather fought it out, no doubt.

And when she thought about it, Bryce wondered if maybe she would have, too.

* * *

 

Bryce let Tony take her up to his suite, and while he filled Steve in on the last hour and they started tearing through security feeds to see what kind of footage they caught of any invaders, Bryce drifted to the kitchen to get herself a drink.

Ten minutes later she was still there, leaning against a counter, fighting a battle between stilling her thoughts to calm herself or sorting out this entire mystery using what little she actually knew. Someone Ross was working with. Someone who had apparently met Bryce before. Someone with a hell of a lot of technical savvy.

Maybe not someone with a lot of firepower, though. They wanted her to go to them willingly, Ross had been trying for a while to get to her through Tony, and when that didn't work they rigged this computer contact instead of coming for her directly.

The person in the video had said that they could take her by force, but obviously they didn't want to. In fact, it very well might have been a bluff. He cited his invasion into her lab as proof that they were capable of it, but a stealth invasion was very different from an all-out attack. Capturing Bryce alone would have taken more firepower than she'd ever had set against her, and that wasn't factoring Tony and Steve and the rest of the Avengers.

The Thing was practically impossible to capture. It was invulnerable – it could bleed, but it took an entire fleet of alien vessels firing at it nonstop to draw even a little blood. It got stronger the more it felt pain, and if all else failed it had enough of a sense of self-preservation to simply get away when it felt overpowered. It could break through the walls of Stark Tower and just a few leaps would have taken it across the city and out of anyone's reach.

So despite the threats, despite Ross's confidence that he could destroy Tony for hiding her, there was an obvious disadvantage to trying to take her by force. Which meant the break-in, stealing her blood from the lab, sending threats...that was all meant to gt her into their hands without violence.

So was it better to--

“--no idea I'm even here, do you?”

Bryce blinked, her eyes jerking open and focusing instantly on a smirking Natasha Romanoff, standing with arms folded by the broad entrance to the kitchen.

Natasha laughed softly. “You with me now, doc?”

Bryce let out a breath, trying to laugh in return. This was not a good time to get lost in her own head, so the idea that someone could walk right up without her noticing...

She stilled those thoughts. Self-flagellation was a slippery slope to start going down. “Sorry,” she said, forcing a smile. “It's been a long day. When did you get here?”

“Five minutes ago. Tony said it was urgent.” Natasha studied her, looking amused. “I didn't realize dinner was going to be formal.”

Bryce looked down at herself and flushed when she realized she was still in her post-bathtub panic clothes. Bare feet, no bra or underwear, shirt on backwards. She swallowed down embarrassment and simply pulled her arms through her sleeves to turn the shirt around.

Natasha moved in and headed for the refrigerator. “I got here as fast as I could, but I see it wasn't fast enough.”

Bryce sagged back once her clothes were as sorted as they were going to get. She ran a hand over her temple to try to focus. “Nothing you could have done,” she said. “Tony wants to sic you on Ross, and there's no way he was here himself today.”

Natasha pulled out a bottle of water and gestured it, and grabbed a second one when Bryce nodded in answer. She tossed the second bottle and shut the door, leaning back against the broad fridge. “Thunderbolt Ross?”

“The man himself.”

“Suddenly I'm hearing that guy's name everywhere.” Natasha approached Bryce slowly, her brow creased in thought. “He's been doing business with SHIELD pretty recently.”

“What kind of business?”

“Classified. Same as always. Ever since your accident he's been on SHIELD's contact list. We helped out with Blonsky and a few other situations he helped bring about.”

Bryce smiled thinly. “Is that what I was before the Chitauri? One of Ross's 'situations'?”

Natasha shrugged.

It was no secret that SHIELD had known about Bryce for years and kept up with her movements, though from a distance. If she or the Thing had become a problem for them, she had no doubt Fury would have put her on some Wanted list, and Natasha would have come to her in a very different context than she eventually did.

Bryce hated groups like SHIELD. They knew too much, and they liked to keep secrets from their own people. Vital, dangerous secrets. Of course they worked with Ross. Of course Ross knew about them. Whoever he was working with apparently sent corrupted files through SHIELD's servers.

“It's different now,” Natasha said mildly. Her expression was bland, but her eyes were cautious. “Unlike Ross or the disasters that follow him, we have an interest in keeping you safe and happy.”

Bryce looked down at the water in her hand, mostly to keep from any kind of verbal reaction to that. She glanced toward the kitchen doorway, but there weren't any obvious sounds coming from beyond. No sign of Tony and Steve, though they had to be out there talking over the whole mess.

She had no idea how Natasha did it. After the life she'd had, to still be at the beck and call of a shadowy organization that regarded people as assets or threats or else didn't regard them at all. Bryce almost wanted to ask, to find out how Natasha justified it to herself.

But she doubted Natasha would tell her. Not anything real. Natasha was her teammate and ally, but she feared the Thing and so she still treated Bryce with wariness. She had been the only one of the Avengers to regard her as a considerable threat even from the start, without allowances for her gender, or her slight, rumpled appearance.

Well, the only one aside from Thor. His complete acceptance of Bryce (and Natasha) as a fellow warrior without a single thought given to her gender had made Bryce want to see the kind of land and people that he came from.

“You're staring, doc.”

Bryce blinked, realizing that her eyes were in fact still on Natasha as her thoughts scattered again. She really had to get a hold of herself. This lack of focus wasn't characteristic, and it was the worst time in the world for it.

Natasha just studied her, inscrutable as always. “What are you thinking?”

Bryce wondered what her expression had given away. She shrugged after a moment and answered honestly. “About how little you trust me.”

“SHIELD considers you one of its--”

“Not SHIELD. You.”

Natasha's head cocked to the side. Her mouth closed.

Bryce offered a faint smile. “Just an observation.”

Natasha leaned back against the wide fridge, uncapping her water bottle. She took a drink, her eyes staying on Bryce. The pause was thoughtful. “It's hard to trust someone who doesn't even trust themselves.”

“Fair enough,” Bryce answered. She pasted another smile on and gripped her water. At least Natasha would help, trust or no trust. For Bryce, who was just starting to really trust two men she had actually slept with, that wasn't an issue that could be forced.

She turned to head for the door, to join Tony and Steve and start seriously plotting how to respond to this threat.

“I envy you.”

Those words stopped her in her tracks. Bryce turned back to Natasha, startled. “What?”

Natasha stood right where she'd been, her expression still neutral. “In a way, at least. That Thing in your blood...I envy you that.”

“You...” Bryce shook her head instantly, even through her surprise. “Don't. I wouldn't wish it on an enemy.”

With a thin, polite smile, she approached Bryce and the doorway slowly. “It seems honest, if nothing else.”

“The Thing?”

“Mm. Such simple, unrestrained rage. I envy you such a direct outlet for your anger.”

Natasha stopped in front of her. She was shorter than Bryce by maybe an inch. Slighter, and a striking woman both in appearance and in fortitude. There was a solid wall of strength behind her eyes. Even when Natasha allowed herself no expression beyond utter blankness, that strength remained.

She wasn't allowed much honest emotion, Bryce could guess easily enough. Bryce had been given a highly edited file about Natasha and the other Avengers as they flew from India to rendezvous with the helicarrier before the battle with Loki and the Chitauri. Despite the lack of specifics in the file, Bryce read enough to draw her own conclusions.

Natasha was a spy, a covert agent. She was gifted at turning herself into whatever her handlers needed her to be. Her job depended on becoming a fake person with a fake history, and fake emotional responses. She wasn't a soldier. Fighting, as good as she was at it, was always Plan B for someone like her. She had to be surrounded by the worst people imaginable, and wasn't allowed to have a single honest reaction to them.

So her envy of a creature that was entirely emotionally driven was understandable, maybe. But it was misguided.

Bryce didn't have to say anything – they weren't close, and Natasha's admission was what it was. A simple admission, nothing more. But she did respond, and the words were oddly hard to push out.

“You're wrong.”

Natasha raised her eyebrows silently.

Bryce swallowed. “The Thing isn't an outlet for my anger. The Thing has _robbed_ me of anger. It's made me more helpless than I ever was without it.”

“Helpless.” Natasha simply repeated the word, regarding Bryce.

She hesitated, thinking about how to explain. “I feel anger. I have to. If I can keep up a baseline of anger then the spikes are easier to manage, and through the spikes, the Thing. But I can't express anger. I can't give in to it. I can't experience it.”

She moved away from the doorway, not wanting to risk being overheard. She moved to the ornate marble island in the middle of the cavernous kitchen, setting her water bottle down and organizing what she wanted to say.

Soft footsteps followed her after a moment, but she didn't look back.

“I could tell you a hundred stories,” she said, her voice low, “about situations I got into while I was on my own, traveling. Not dangerous the way you'd think of it. Not anything involving the Thing or the Army. Just the day to day dangers of being a woman alone in a strange place, trying to find help. I could tell you about being robbed, being stranded a hundred miles from anywhere because I wouldn't pay for a ride with my body. About crowded train rides spent huddled in a corner in an attempt to keep the hands of strangers off of me.”

She hesitated, glancing back.

Natasha stood on the other side of the island. She just nodded when Bryce looked at her, no surprise in her face. She was also a woman who had traveled the world and seen the worst of people, no doubt she had been through the same kinds of things.

“Before the accident I could have gotten angry when things like that happened. I did. I told off quite a few people in my time. I was good at anger. I had stores of it, and I liked unleashing it. The world hates an angry woman, but I was never scared of being seen as a bitch.” She smiled, thin. “Since the accident, if I get angry I unleash a weapon that I can't control. If I get angry, people get hurt. People die. So I am robbed of any reaction at all.”

Bryce looked back down at her hands, at the rippled marble of the island. “I can't yell, I can't slap hands away or throw a punch or issue threats. Because the moment my heart beats fast enough with that adrenal response in my blood...” She let out a breath. “I can't justify responding to an insult, or a mugging, or even some grope on a train, with murder. And so I'm not allowed to respond at all.” She smiled after a moment. “I would give anything to be able to throw a tantrum. Just once, just for old time's sake. Instead all that anger gets stifled and channeled into a nice, even baseline, and that has to be good enough.”

Natasha nodded slowly, her brow creasing.

“The Thing is a primal creature that runs on pure fury, yeah. But it's not my fury. I don't get to feel it. I'm half a person now, robbed of that response, and trust me when I say that I wouldn't wish it on anyone in the world. Especially not someone like you, who needs their anger so badly.”

Natasha studied her, and after a moment she smiled. It was small and wry. “You know, I still don't trust you entirely. Not yet, and maybe not ever with that Thing in your body. But I like you. And we're a team. Which means whatever it is that's going on here, with Ross or whoever's pulling his strings, I'm gonna help you sort it out. I'll nail his ass to a wall if I need to. Once that's done, maybe I can help you with that whole anger thing.”

Bryce let out a breath. “Trust me, there's not a breathing exercise or zen technique that I haven't mastered. I am an expert of repressing anger, there's not much I can still learn there.”

“About repressing it? Probably not.” Natasha moved around the island and clapped her on the arm, nodding towards the door. “But I'd be dead about a thousand times over if I didn't have a way to funnel out my emotions while still keeping a smile on my face. Deep cover's a hell of a thing, Bryce; it comes with a skill set all its own. I've got a few tricks that might come in handy.”

“Worth a try,” Bryce said, returning her smile tentatively.

“There's not enough of us in this life, doc. It's a boy's club. We have to look out for each other.”

“And the trust can come afterward?”

“Sure.” Natasha grabbed her arm and they headed for the door, back to the front rooms of the suite and all the problems waiting there for them.

 

* * *

 


End file.
